Mépris de classe: Qui veut être traité de déplorable ou de Dupont Lajoie ? (Jaws for sharks: 40 years of hollywoodization and they put you in the basket of racist deplorables and bitter clingers)

The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast. The slow one now will later be fast as the present now will later be past. The order is rapidly fadin’ and the first one now will later be last for the times they are a-changin. Bob Dylan

What I take to be the film’s statement (upper case). This has to do with the threat that people like the nonconforming Wyatt and Billy represent to the ordinary, self-righteous, inhibited folk that are the Real America. Wyatt and Billy, says the lawyer, represent freedom; ergo, says the film, they must be destroyed. If there is any irony in this supposition, I was unable to detect it in the screenplay written by Fonda, Hopper and Terry Southern. Wyatt and Billy don’t seem particularly free, not if the only way they can face the world is through a grass curtain. As written and played, they are lumps of gentle clay, vacuous, romantic symbols, dressed in cycle drag.The NYT (1969)

Since Easy Rider is the film that is said finally to separate the men from the boys – at a time when the generation gap has placed a stigma on being a man – I want to point out that those who make heroes of Wyatt and Billy (played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) have a reasonably acrid dose to swallow at the start of the picture. Wyatt and Billy (names borrowed from the fumigated memory of the two outlaws of the Old West) make the bankroll on which they hope to live a life of easy-riding freedom by smuggling a considerable quantity of heroin across from Mexico and selling it to a nutty looking addict in a goon-chauffered Rolls Royce. Pulling off one big job and thereafter living in virtuous indolence is a fairly common dream of criminals, and dope peddling is a particularly unappetizing way of doing it. Is it thought O.K. on the other side of the gap, to buy freedom at that price? If so, grooving youth has a wealth of conscience to spend. (…) Wyatt and Billy are presented as attractive and enviable; gentle, courteous, peaceable, sliding through the heroic Western landscape on their luxurious touring motorcycles (with the swag hidden in one of the gas tanks). It is true that they come to a bloody end, gunned down by a couple of Southern rednecks for their long hair. But it is not retribution; indeed, they might have passed safely if the cretins in the pickup truck had realized that they were big traders on holiday. (…) The hate is that of Fonda, Hopper and Southern, they hate the element in American life that tries to destroy anyone who fails to conform, who demands to ride free. And it is quite right that they should. But Wyatt and Billy are more rigidly conformist, their life more narrowly obsessive than that of any broker’s clerk on the nine to five. The Nation (2008)

Easy Rider (1969) is the late 1960s « road film » tale of a search for freedom (or the illusion of freedom) in a conformist and corrupt America, in the midst of paranoia, bigotry and violence. Released in the year of the Woodstock concert, and made in a year of two tragic assassinations (Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King), the Vietnam War buildup and Nixon’s election, the tone of this ‘alternative’ film is remarkably downbeat and bleak, reflecting the collapse of the idealistic 60s. Easy Rider, one of the first films of its kind, was a ritualistic experience and viewed (often repeatedly) by youthful audiences in the late 1960s as a reflection of their realistic hopes of liberation and fears of the Establishment. The iconographic, ‘buddy’ film, actually minimal in terms of its artistic merit and plot, is both memorialized as an image of the popular and historical culture of the time and a story of a contemporary but apocalyptic journey by two self-righteous, drug-fueled, anti-hero (or outlaw) bikers eastward through the American Southwest. Their trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans takes them through limitless, untouched landscapes (icons such as Monument Valley), various towns, a hippie commune, and a graveyard (with hookers), but also through areas where local residents are increasingly narrow-minded and hateful of their long-haired freedom and use of drugs. The film’s title refers to their rootlessness and ride to make « easy » money; it is also slang for a pimp who makes his livelihood off the earnings of a prostitute. However, the film’s original title was The Loners. [The names of the two main characters, Wyatt and Billy, suggest the two memorable Western outlaws Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid – or ‘Wild Bill’ Hickcock. Rather than traveling westward on horses as the frontiersmen did, the two modern-day cowboys travel eastward from Los Angeles – the end of the traditional frontier – on decorated Harley-Davidson choppers on an epic journey into the unknown for the ‘American dream’.] According to slogans on promotional posters, they were on a search: A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere… Their costumes combine traditional patriotic symbols with emblems of loneliness, criminality and alienation – the American flag, cowboy decorations, long-hair, and drugs. (…) Easy Rider surprisingly, was an extremely successful, low-budget (under $400,000), counter-cultural, independent film for the alternative youth/cult market – one of the first of its kind that was an enormous financial success, grossing $40 million worldwide. Its story contained sex, drugs, casual violence, a sacrificial tale (with a shocking, unhappy ending), and a pulsating rock and roll soundtrack reinforcing or commenting on the film’s themes. Groups that participated musically included Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix, The Band and Bob Dylan. The pop cultural, mini-revolutionary film was also a reflection of the « New Hollywood, » and the first blockbuster hit from a new wave of Hollywood directors (e.g., Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese) that would break with a number of Hollywood conventions. It had little background or historical development of characters, a lack of typical heroes, uneven pacing, jump cuts and flash-forward transitions between scenes, an improvisational style and mood of acting and dialogue, background rock ‘n’ roll music to complement the narrative, and the equation of motorbikes with freedom on the road rather than with delinquent behaviors. However, its idyllic view of life and example of personal film-making was overshadowed by the self-absorbent, drug-induced, erratic behavior of the filmmakers, chronicled in Peter Biskind’s tell-all Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1999). And the influential film led to a flurry of equally self-indulgent, anti-Establishment themed films by inferior filmmakers, who overused some of the film’s technical tricks and exploited the growing teen-aged market for easy profits. (…) Death seems to be the only freedom or means to escape from the system in America where alternative lifestyles and idealism are despised as too challenging or free. The romance of the American highway is turned menacing and deadly. Filmsite

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.Barack Obama

I do think that when you combine that demographic change with all the economic stresses that people have been going through because of the financial crisis, because of technology, because of globalization, the fact that wages and incomes have been flatlining for some time, and that particularly blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck. You combine those things, and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear. Some of it justified, but just misdirected. I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that. That’s what he’s exploiting during the course of his campaign. Barack Hussein Obama

My mother is not watching. She said she doesn’t watch white award shows because you guys don’t thank Jesus enough. That’s true. The only white people that thank Jesus are Republicans and ex-crackheads. Michael Che

Populism might even be seen as idealistic, another wing of ‘post-materialistic’ politics more normally associated with the environmental movement; a quest for meaning and collective identity in a secular, individualistic modern world. When people in Sunderland voted for Brexit apparently against their material interests it was considered stupid; when affluent people vote for higher taxes it is considered admirable. David Goodhart

The Remain campaign was all about money and how much people would lose if Britain exited the EU. The Leave campaign was all about restoring a semblance of meaning to people’s lives, despite not having much money. As a vote for something more than money – for pride, belonging, community, identity, a sense of “home” – it was a rejection of the market. We might not much like some elements of this “vote for meaning”, but it was a vote with the heart, rather than the wallet. The result was a reminder that people need something in their lives that feels more important than money – especially, perhaps, when they have little prospect of having much. Charles Leadbeater

You often hear men say, “Why don’t they just leave?” [. . .] And I ask them, how many of you seen the movie Deliverance? And every man will raise his hand. And I’ll say, what’s the one scene you remember in Deliverance? And every man here knows exactly what scene to think of. And I’ll say, “After those guys tied that one guy in that tree and raped him, man raped him, in that film. Why didn’t the guy go to the sheriff? What would you have done? “Well, I’d go back home get my gun. I’d come back and find him.” Why wouldn’t you go to the sheriff? Why? Well, the reason why is they are ashamed. They are embarrassed. I say, why do you think so many women that get raped, so many don’t report it? They don’t want to get raped again by the system.Joe Biden

Trump’s message resonates with working class stiffs who believe that, despite his wealth, he understands them and their concerns. When he speaks, they understand him. There’s no complex grammar to parse. And there’s none of the phony folksiness you get from the Dems, none of the sho-nuffs and y’alls from a Hillary. To many ordinary Americans, Trump represents the promise of America as a land where everyone should have an opportunity to make it to the top if he works hard enough. These are the folks who gave the last election to Barak Obama because he made this promise, and now they’re disillusioned. (…) Many Ruling Class Republicans seem to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. To these folks, the Trump-Kelly dust-up was the last straw. Writing in the Post, Jennifer Rubin bellyaches that Trump “whines,” “bellyaches,” and “complains.” Even (gasp!) “during the debate.” Trump had the unmitigated chutzpah to call out a member of the sacred media priesthood when she was behaving unprofessionally towards him. Genteel Republicans don’t do that. As is his wont, Trump readily admits the obvious. “I’m the most fabulous whiner…. and I keep whining and whining until I win.” And win he did, Most candidates beg the media to cover them. The reverse is true with Trump. After the dust-up with Kelly, it was Trump who black-listed Fox when he was doing the Sunday news shows, and Fox begged him to come back and make up. Wanna bet that in the future a debate moderator will think twice before treating Trump unfairly? (…) George Will is not the only Ruling Class Republican to express contempt for Donald Trump. And some express even more contempt for those who like him. Writing for National Review Online, Charles C. Cooke calls Trump a “virus.” (What is it with these misophobics?) and those who like him are ill, infected. You can recognize them because “by their dull, unreflective, often ovine behavior, they resemble binary and nuanceless drones.” Nuanceless? Choosing Trump for the presidential nomination, explains Cooke, is “comparable…to a person’s choosing a disabled man to run in a marathon.” Who would do something like that? Oh, wait. The disabled do compete in marathons, and have done so with pride since 1972. I’m sure that Cooke didn’t intend to diss the disabled. The problem for Ruling Class Conservatives like Will and Cooke, is that the Left has emasculated them. They tremble lest they let slip a faux pas that the Left can jump upon. They must at all times show that their Conservatism is “intellectually respectable and politically palatable,” and worry that Trump will make them look bad to the Liberals and their media. They are unable to grasp the fact that, notwithstanding all their efforts, the Left will never regard them as respectable and palatable. To achieve that goal, they must first become Liberals themselves. Trump makes it clear that he doesn’t give a damn what Liberals think of us. And everyday people of all political persuasions applaud when he stands up to the self-important elitist media, just as they did with Newt Gingrich in 2012. It’s time for the Right to man-up. Emulate Donald Trump and the Canadians.Esther Goldberg

After the election, in liberal, urban America, one often heard Trump’s win described as the revenge of the yahoos in flyover country, fueled by their angry “isms” and “ias”: racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and so on. Many liberals consoled themselves that Trump’s victory was the last hurrah of bigoted, Republican white America, soon to be swept away by vast forces beyond its control, such as global migration and the cultural transformation of America into something far from the Founders’ vision. As insurance, though, furious progressives also renewed calls to abolish the Electoral College, advocating for a constitutional amendment that would turn presidential elections into national plebiscites. Direct presidential voting would shift power to heavily urbanized areas—why waste time trying to reach more dispersed voters in less populated rural states?—and thus institutionalize the greater economic and cultural clout of the metropolitan blue-chip universities, the big banks, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, New York–Washington media, and Hollywood, Democrat-voting all. Barack Obama’s two electoral victories deluded the Democrats into thinking that it was politically wise to jettison their old blue-collar appeal to the working classes, mostly living outside the cities these days, in favor of an identity politics of a new multicultural, urban America. Yet Trump’s success represented more than simply a triumph of rural whites over multiracial urbanites. More ominously for liberals, it also suggested that a growing minority of blacks and Hispanics might be sympathetic with a “country” mind-set that rejects urban progressive elitism. For some minorities, sincerity and directness might be preferable to sloganeering by wealthy white urban progressives, who often seem more worried about assuaging their own guilt than about genuinely understanding people of different colors. Trump’s election underscored two other liberal miscalculations. First, Obama’s progressive agenda and cultural elitism prevailed not because of their ideological merits, as liberals believed, but because of his great appeal to urban minorities in 2008 and 2012, who voted in solidarity for the youthful first African-American president in numbers never seen before. That fealty wasn’t automatically transferable to liberal white candidates, including the multimillionaire 69-year-old Hillary Clinton. Obama had previously lost most of America’s red counties, but not by enough to keep him from winning two presidential elections, with sizable urban populations in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania turning out to vote for the most left-wing presidential candidate since George McGovern. Second, rural America hadn’t fully raised its electoral head in anger in 2008 and 2012 because it didn’t see the Republican antidotes to Obama’s progressive internationalism as much better than the original malady. Socially moderate establishmentarians like the open-borders-supporting John McCain or wealthy businessman Mitt Romney didn’t resonate with the spirit of rural America—at least not enough to persuade millions to come to the polls instead of sitting the elections out. Trump connected with these rural voters with far greater success than liberals anticipated. Urban minorities failed in 2016 to vote en bloc, in their Obama-level numbers; and rural Americans, enthused by Trump, increased their turnout, so that even a shrinking American countryside still had enough clout to win. What is insufficiently understood is why a hurting rural America favored the urban, superrich Trump in 2016 and, more generally, tends to vote more conservative than liberal. Ostensibly, the answer is clear: an embittered red-state America has found itself left behind by elite-driven globalization, battered by unfettered trade and high-tech dislocations in the economy. In some of the most despairing counties, rural life has become a mirror image of the inner city, ravaged by drug use, criminality, and hopelessness. Yet if muscular work has seen a decline in its relative monetary worth, it has not necessarily lost its importance. After all, the elite in Washington and Menlo Park appreciate the fresh grapes and arugula that they purchase at Whole Foods. Someone mined the granite used in their expensive kitchen counters and cut the timber for their hardwood floors. The fuel in their hybrid cars continues to come from refined oil. The city remains as dependent on this elemental stuff—typically produced outside the suburbs and cities—as it always was. The two Palo Altoans at Starbucks might have forgotten that their overpriced homes included two-by-fours, circuit breakers, and four-inch sewer pipes, but somebody somewhere made those things and brought them into their world. In the twenty-first century, though, the exploitation of natural resources and the manufacturing of products are more easily outsourced than are the arts of finance, insurance, investments, higher education, entertainment, popular culture, and high technology, immaterial sectors typically pursued within metropolitan contexts and supercharged by the demands of increasingly affluent global consumers. A vast government sector, mostly urban, is likewise largely impervious to the leveling effects of a globalized economy, even as its exorbitant cost and extended regulatory reach make the outsourcing of material production more likely. Asian steel may have devastated Youngstown, but Chinese dumping had no immediate effect on the flourishing government enclaves in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia, filled with well-paid knowledge workers. Globalization, big government, and metastasizing regulations have enriched the American coasts, in other words, while damaging much of the nation’s interior. Few major political leaders before Trump seemed to care. He hammered home the point that elites rarely experienced the negative consequences of their own ideologies. New York Times columnists celebrating a “flat” world have yet to find themselves flattened by Chinese writers willing to write for a fraction of their per-word rate. Tenured Harvard professors hymning praise to global progressive culture don’t suddenly discover their positions drawn and quartered into four part-time lecturer positions. And senators and bureaucrats in Washington face no risk of having their roles usurped by low-wage Vietnamese politicians. Trump quickly discovered that millions of Americans were irate that the costs and benefits of our new economic reality were so unevenly distributed. As the nation became more urban and its wealth soared, the old Democratic commitment from the Roosevelt era to much of rural America—construction of water projects, rail, highways, land banks, and universities; deference to traditional values; and Grapes of Wrath–like empathy—has largely been forgotten. A confident, upbeat urban America promoted its ever more radical culture without worrying much about its effects on a mostly distant and silent small-town other. In 2008, gay marriage and women in combat were opposed, at least rhetorically, by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in their respective presidential campaigns. By 2016, mere skepticism on these issues was viewed by urban elites as reactionary ignorance. In other words, it was bad enough that rural America was getting left behind economically; adding insult to injury, elite America (which is Democrat America) openly caricatured rural citizens’ traditional views and tried to force its own values on them. Lena Dunham’s loud sexual politics and Beyoncé’s uncritical evocation of the Black Panthers resonated in blue cities and on the coasts, not in the heartland. Only in today’s bifurcated America could billion-dollar sports conglomerates fail to sense that second-string San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protests of the national anthem would turn off a sizable percentage of the National Football League’s viewing audience, which is disproportionately conservative and middle American. These cultural themes, too, Trump addressed forcefully. In classical literature, patriotism and civic militarism were always closely linked with farming and country life. In the twenty-first century, this is still true. The incubator of the U.S. officer corps is red-state America. “Make America Great Again” reverberated in the pro-military countryside because it emphasized an exceptionalism at odds with the Left’s embrace of global values. Residents in Indiana and Wisconsin were unimpressed with the Democrats’ growing embrace of European-style “soft power,” socialism, and statism—all the more so in an age of European constitutional, financial, and immigration sclerosis. Trump’s slogan unabashedly expressed American individualism; Clinton’s “Stronger Together” gave off a whiff of European socialist solidarity. Trump, the billionaire Manhattanite wheeler-dealer, made an unlikely agrarian, true; but he came across during his presidential run as a clear advocate of old-style material jobs, praising vocational training and clearly enjoying his encounters with middle-American homemakers, welders, and carpenters. Trump talked more on the campaign about those who built his hotels than those who financed them. He could point to the fact that he made stuff, unlike Clinton, who got rich without any obvious profession other than leveraging her office. Give the thrice-married, orange-tanned, and dyed-haired Trump credit for his political savvy in promising to restore to the dispossessed of the Rust Belt their old jobs and to give back to farmers their diverted irrigation water, and for assuring small towns that arriving new Americans henceforth would be legal—and that, over time, they would become similar to their hosts in language, custom, and behavior. Ironically, part of Trump’s attraction for red-state America was his posture as a coastal-elite insider—but now enlisted on the side of the rustics. A guy who had built hotels all over the world, and understood how much money was made and lost through foreign investment, offered to put such expertise in the service of the heartland—against the supposed currency devaluers, trade cheats, and freeloaders of Europe, China, and Japan. Trump’s appeal to the interior had partly to do with his politically incorrect forthrightness. Each time Trump supposedly blundered in attacking a sacred cow—sloppily deprecating national hero John McCain’s wartime captivity or nastily attacking Fox superstar Megyn Kelly for her supposed unfairness—the coastal media wrote him off as a vulgar loser. Not Trump’s base. Seventy-five percent of his supporters polled that his crude pronouncements didn’t bother them. As one grape farmer told me after the Access Hollywood hot-mike recordings of Trump making sexually vulgar remarks had come to light, “Who cares? I’d take Trump on his worst day better than Hillary on her best.” Apparently red-state America was so sick of empty word-mongering that it appreciated Trump’s candor, even when it was sometimes inaccurate, crude, or cruel. Outside California and New York City and other elite blue areas, for example, foreigners who sneak into the country and reside here illegally are still “illegal aliens,” not “undocumented migrants,” a blue-state term that masks the truth of their actions. Trump’s Queens accent and frequent use of superlatives—“tremendous,” “fantastic,” “awesome”—weren’t viewed by red-state America as a sign of an impoverished vocabulary but proof that a few blunt words can capture reality. To the rural mind, verbal gymnastics reveal dishonest politicians, biased journalists, and conniving bureaucrats, who must hide what they really do and who they really are. Think of the arrogant condescension of Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the disastrous Obamacare law, who admitted that the bill was written deliberately in a “tortured way” to mislead the “stupid” American voter. To paraphrase Cicero on his preference for the direct Plato over the obscure Pythagoreans, rural Americans would have preferred to be wrong with the blunt-talking Trump than to be right with the mush-mouthed Hillary Clinton. One reason that Trump may have outperformed both McCain and Romney with minority voters was that they appreciated how much the way he spoke rankled condescending white urban liberals. Poorer, less cosmopolitan, rural people can also experience a sense of inferiority when they venture into the city, unlike smug urbanites visiting red-state America. The rural folk expect to be seen as deplorables, irredeemables, and clingers by city folk. My countryside neighbors do not wish to hear anything about Stanford University, where I work—except if by chance I note that Stanford people tend to be condescending and pompous, confirming my neighbors’ suspicions about city dwellers. And just as the urban poor have always had their tribunes, so, too, have rural residents flocked to an Andrew Jackson or a William Jennings Bryan, politicians who enjoyed getting back at the urban classes for perceived slights. The more Trump drew the hatred of PBS, NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS, the elite press, the universities, the foundations, and Hollywood, the more he triumphed in red-state America. Indeed, one irony of the 2016 election is that identity politics became a lethal boomerang for progressives. After years of seeing America reduced to a binary universe, with culpable white Christian males encircled by ascendant noble minorities, gays, feminists, and atheists—usually led by courageous white-male progressive crusaders—red-state America decided that two could play the identity-politics game. In 2016, rural folk did silently in the voting booth what urban America had done to them so publicly in countless sitcoms, movies, and political campaigns. In sum, Donald Trump captured the twenty-first-century malaise of a rural America left behind by globalized coastal elites and largely ignored by the establishments of both political parties. Central to Trump’s electoral success, too, were age-old rural habits and values that tend to make the interior broadly conservative. That a New York billionaire almost alone grasped how red-state America truly thought, talked, and acted, and adjusted his message and style accordingly, will remain one of the astonishing ironies of American political history.Victor Davis Hanson

The slide in his popularity – Macron is now more unpopular than his predecessor, François Hollande, at the same stage – is a dire warning to “globalists”. It comes at a time when Trump’s popularity among his voters is relatively stable by comparison and the American economy is growing. Macron’s fate could have far-reaching consequences for Europe’s political future. What makes the contrast between Trump’s and Macron’s fortunes so striking is that the two presidents have so much in common. Both found electoral success by breaking free of their own side: Macron from the left and Trump from mainstream Republicanism; they both moved beyond the old left-right divide. Both realised that we were seeing the disappearance of the old western middle class. Both grasped that, for the first time in history, the working people who make up the solid base of the lower middle classes live, for the most part, in regions that now generate the fewest jobs. It is in the small or middling towns and vast stretches of farmland that skilled workers, the low-waged, small farmers and the self-employed are concentrated. These are the regions in which the future of western democracy will be decided. But the similarities end there. While Trump was elected by people in the heartlands of the American rustbelt states, Macron built his electoral momentum in the big globalised cities. While the French president is aware that social ties are weakening in the regions, he believes that the solution is to speed up reform to bring the country into line with the requirements of the global economy. Trump, by contrast, concluded that globalisation was the problem, and that the economic model it is based on would have to be reined in (through protectionism, limits on free trade agreements, controls on immigration, and spending on vast public infrastructure building) to create jobs in the deindustrialised parts of the US. It could be said that to some extent both presidents are implementing the policies they were elected to pursue. Yet, while Trump’s voters seem satisfied, Macron’s appear frustrated. Why is there such a difference? This has as much to do with the kind of voters involved as the way the two presidents operate politically. Trump speaks to voters who constitute a continuum, that of the old middle class. It is a body of voters with clearly expressed demands – most call for the creation of jobs, but they also want the preservation of their social and cultural model. Macron’s problem, on the other hand, is that his electorate consists of different elements that are hard to keep together. The idea that Macron was elected just by the big city “winners” isn’t accurate: he also attracted the support of many older voters who are not especially receptive to the economic and societal changes the president’s revolution demands.This holds true throughout Europe. Those who support globalisation often tend to forget a vital fact: the people who vote for them aren’t just the ones on the winning side in the globalisation stakes or part of the new, cool bourgeoisie in Paris, London or New York, but are a much more heterogeneous group, many of whom are sceptical about the effects of globalisation. In France, for example, most of Macron’s support came in the first instance from the ranks of pensioners and public sector workers who had been largely shielded from the effects of globalisation. (…) These developments are an illustration of the political difficulty that Europe’s globalising class now finds itself in. From Angela Merkel to Macron, the advocates of globalisation are now relying on voters who cling to a social model that held sway during the three decades of postwar economic growth. Thus their determination to accelerate the adaptation of western societies to globalisation automatically condemns them to political unpopularity. Locked away in their metropolitan citadels, they fail to see that their electoral programmes no longer meet the concerns of more than a tiny minority of the population – or worse, of their own voters. They are on the wrong track if they think that the “deplorables” in the deindustrialised states of the US or the struggling regions of France will soon die out. Throughout the west, people in “peripheral” regions still make up the bulk of the population. Like it or not, these areas continue to represent the electoral heartlands of western democracies.Christophe Guilluy

An old man with a straw hat and work shirt appeared at Lewis’ window, talking in. He looked like a hillbilly in some badly cast movie, a character actor too much in character to be believed. I wondered where the excitement was that intrigued Lewis so much; everything in Oree was sleepy and hookwormy and ugly, and most of all, inconsequential. Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place. (…) There is always something wrong with people in the country, I thought. In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment maybe. But there was something else. You’d think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn’t have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong. The catching of an arm in a tractor park somewhere off in the middle of a field where nothing happened but that the sun blazed back more fiercely down the open mouth of one’s screams. And so many snakebites deep in the woods as one stepped over a rotten log, so many domestic animals suddenly turning and crushing one against the splintering side of a barn stall. I wanted none of it, and I didn’t want to be around where it happened either. But I was there, and there was no way for me to escape, except by water, from the country of nine-fingered people.James Dickey

They’re buildin’ a dam across the Cahulawassee River. They’re gonna flood a whole valley, Bobby (…) Dammit, they’re drownin’ the river…Just about the last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unf–ked up river in the South. Don’t you understand what I’m sayin’?…They’re gonna stop the river up. There ain’t gonna be no more river. There’s just gonna be a big, dead lake…You just push a little more power into Atlanta, a little more air-conditioners for your smug little suburb, and you know what’s gonna happen? We’re gonna rape this whole god-damned landscape. We’re gonna rape it. (…) We didn’t lose it – we sold it. Lewis Medlock (principal protagoniste de Delivrance)

These are the men. Nothing very unusual about them. Suburban guys like you or your neighbor. Nothing very unusual about them until they decided to spend one weekend canoeing down the Cahulawassee River. Ed Gentry – he runs an art service, his wife Martha has a boy Dean. Lewis Medlock has real estate interests, talks about resettling in New Zealand or Uruguay. Drew Ballinger – he’s sales supervisor for a soft drink company. Bobby Trippe – bachelor, insurance and mutual funds. These are the men who decided not to play golf that weekend. Instead, they sought the river. Bande-annonce de Deliverance

Deliverance (1972) is British director John Boorman’s gripping, absorbing action-adventure film about four suburban Atlanta businessmen friends who encounter disaster in a summer weekend’s river-canoeing trip. It was one of the first films with the theme of city-dwellers against the powerful forces of nature. The exciting box-office hit, most remembered for its inspired banjo duel and the brutal, violent action (and sodomy scene), was based on James Dickey’s adaptation of his own 1970 best-selling novel (his first) of the same name – he contributed the screenplay and acted in a minor part as the town sheriff. (…) The increasingly claustrophobic, downbeat film, shot in linear sequence along forty miles of a treacherous river, has been looked upon as a philosophical or mythical allegory of man’s psychological and grueling physical journey against adversity. It came during the 70s decade when many other conspiracy or corruption-related films were made with misgivings, paranoia or questioning of various societal institutions or subject areas, such as the media (i.e., Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976)), politics (i.e., The Parallax View (1974), All the President’s Men (1976)), science (i.e., Capricorn One (1977), Coma (1978), The China Syndrome (1979)), and various parts of the US itself (i.e., Race with the Devil (1975), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and later Southern Comfort (1981)). A group of urban dwellers test their manhood and courage, totally vulnerable in the alien wild, and pit themselves against the hostile violence of nature. At times, however, they are attracted to nature, and exhilarated and joyful about their experiences in the wild. (Director Boorman pursued the same complex eco-message theme of man vs. nature in other films, including Zardoz (1973) and The Emerald Forest (1985).) As they progress further and further along in uncharted territory down the rapids, the men ‘rape’ the untouched, virginal wilderness as they are themselves violated by the pristine wilderness and its degenerate, inbred backwoods inhabitants. Survivalist skills come to the forefront when civilized standards of decency and logic fail. (…) The river is the potent personification of the complex, natural forces that propel men further and further along their paths. It tests their personal values, exhibiting the conflict between country and city, and accentuates what has been hidden or unrealized in civilized society. The adventurers vainly seek to be ‘delivered’ from the evil in their own hearts, and as in typical horror films, confront other-worldly forces in the deep woods. The flooding of the region after the completion of a dam construction project alludes to the purification and cleansing of the sins of the world by the Great Flood. The film was also interpreted as an allegory of the US’ involvement in the Vietnam War – as the men (the US military) intruded into a foreign world (Southeast Asia), and found it was raped or confronted by wild forces it couldn’t understand or control.The film opens with voice-overs of the main characters discussing the « vanishing wilderness » and the corruption of modern civilization, while the credits play over views of the flooding of one of the last untamed stretches of land, and the imminent wiping out of the entire Cahulawassee River and the small town of Aintry. (…) They leave behind their business jobs and civilized values for their « last chance » to go back to unspoiled nature for a weekend of canoeing, hunting, and fishing, in northern Georgia’s scenic Appalachian wilderness. (…) More threatening than the untamed river are two evil, violent, primitive, degenerate and hostile mountain men, a gay hillbilly (Bill McKinney) and a grizzly, toothless man (Herbert « Cowboy » Coward) armed with a 12 gauge double-barreled shotgun who suddenly appear from the woods and confront the intruders. [The wilderness isn’t populated with romantic survivalists or enobled, heroic characters as in adventure stories, but sadistic brutes.] The two inexperienced, naive adventurers, assuming that the menacing backwoodsmen (who are harrassing them) are hiding a still to manufacture bootleg whiskey, promise not to tell anyone where it is located. Even away from his urban citified element, Ed maintains an inappropriate decorum of decency and ineffectually calls the animalistic rednecks ‘gentlemen’ (…) At shotgun point, in a nightmarish and frightening sequence, the two sexually-perverted rustics viciously target them. They order them up into the woods where they tie Ed (with his own belt) to a tree. The mountain man sexually humiliates Bobby – the chubby-faced, defenseless intruder into his territory. (…) Returning home, Ed is ‘delivered’ from the malevolent horrors of nature and reunited with his wife (Belinda Beatty) and son (Charlie Boorman, the director’s son who played a major role in The Emerald Forest (1985)). The final frightening image is of Ed, snapping awake next to his wife from a vivid nightmare of his journey. He is fearfully haunted by a white, bony hand (of the murdered Mountain Man) rising above the surface of the water of the newly-flooded wilderness. The man’s stiff, outstretched hand – pointing nowhere – serves as a signpost. Ed lies back in his wife’s arms – unable to rest and experience ‘deliverance’ from his recurring nightmare of their experience with extreme violence. Filmsite

And we all know what happens to funny city people in rural Georgia. Jon Stewart (The Daily Show)

We were portrayed as ignorant, backward, scary, deviant, redneck hillbillies. That stuck with us through all these years and in fact that was probably furthest from the truth. These people up here are a very caring, lovely people. There are lots of people in Rabun County that would be just as happy if they never heard the word, ‘Deliverance’ again.Stanley “Butch” Darnell (Rabun County Commissioner)

Dickey’s novel created for readers an Appalachia that served as the site of a collective ‘nightmare,’ to use a term adopted by several of Dickey’s reviewers. The rape of city men by leering ‘hicks,’ central to the novel… became almost synonymous with popular conceptions of the mountain South. (…) Dickey preferred to claim that he grew up in the mountains. He attributed his blustery aggressiveness to his ‘North Georgia folk heritage’ and averred, ‘My people are all hillbillies. I’m only second-generation city.’” [But] though Dickey’s ancestors had indeed lived in mountainous Fannin County, Georgia, they were not the plain folks he made them out to be. He failed to acknowledge that they were slaveholders and among the largest landowners and wealthiest residents of the county. Dickey’s romantic — and racist — vision of Appalachia as a place apart stayed with him his entire life. (…) The consequences of fictional representation have never been more powerful for the imagination of mountainness — or perhaps even for southernness, ruralness, and ‘primitiveness’ more generically — than in the case of ‘Deliverance. (…) Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the thoroughness with which ‘Deliverance,’ transformed by Dickey and director John Boorman into a film classic, has imbricated itself into Americans’ understanding and worldview. From the ubiquitous rendition of the ‘Dueling Banjos’ theme song to allude to danger from hicks to bumper stickers for tourists reading, ‘Paddle faster, I hear banjoes,’ the novel and film have created artifacts that many of us encounter on an almost weekly basis. (…) Southern hopes for self-promotion were evident at the film’s premiere in Atlanta. “Dickey leaned over to say to Jimmy Carter, then the governor: ‘Ain’t no junior league movie is it, Governor?’ ‘It’s pretty rough,’ Carter agreed, ‘but it’s good for Georgia.’ Carter paused. ‘It’s good for Georgia. I hope.’”Emily Satterwhite

The release of “Deliverance” was, without question, a difficult time for rural Southerners. The mountaineers of “Deliverance” were “crippled misfits and savage sodomizers of the North Georgia wilderness” who terrorize the foursome of Atlanta canoeists who simply want to run the rapids of the fictitious Cahulawassee River. Indisputably the most influential film of the modern era in shaping national perceptions of southern mountaineers and rural life in general, Deliverance’s portrayal of degenerate, imbecilic, and sexually voracious predators bred fear into several generations of Americans. As film scholar Pat Arnow only partly facetiously argued in 1991, the film ‘is still the greatest incentive for many non-Southerners to stay on the Interstate.’” (…) The film’s infamous scenes of sodomy at gunpoint and of a retarded albino boy lustily playing his banjo became such instantly recognizable shorthand for demeaning references to rural poor whites that comedians needed to say only ‘squeal like a pig’ or hum the opening notes of the film’s guitar banjo duet to gain an immediate visceral reaction from a studio audience. (…) To (the character) Lewis (and Dickey), the mountain folk’s very backwardness and social isolation has allowed them to retain a physical and mental toughness and to preserve a code of commitment to family and kin that has long ago been lost in the rush to a commodified existence. Lewis praised the ‘values’ passed down from father to son. But all of that meaning appeared to be lost in the film. Instead, Hollywood was much more interested in the horrific tale and captivating adventure of traveling down a North Georgia river being chased by crazed hillbillies. (…) Resentment grew even while the film was being made. As word of how the mountaineers were being portrayed spread, (James Dickey’s son) Christopher Dickey, who was staying with his family in a low-budget motel and had more contact with the local residents acting or working on the set than did Boorman and the lead actors staying in chalets at a nearby golf resort, began to fear for his safety. Shaped by a century of media depictions of brutally violent mountaineers, he worried that some ‘real mountain men’ with ‘real guns’ might ‘teach some of these movie people a lesson.’”Anthony Harkins (Western Kentucky University)

The movie, « Deliverance, » made tourist dollars flow into the area, but there was one memorable, horrifying male rape scene that lasted a little more than four minutes, but has lasted 40 years inside the hearts and minds of the people who live here. Locals say the film painted the county’s residents as deviant, uneducated mountain folk. (…) But despite any negative stereotypes, the Rabun County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau says more than a quarter-million people flock to the area each year to shoot the same rapids they saw come to life on the big screen. (…) County officials say tourism brings in $42 million a year in revenue, which makes for a huge surplus for a county whose operating budget is about $17 million. These days, the county has an 80% high school graduation rate, and its average home price is more than $300,000. (…) The area has become a playground for high-end homeowners with lakefront property in the multimillion-dollar range on places like Lake Burton, which has 62 miles of shoreline. (…) Indeed, downtown shops and art galleries convey an image far from anything portrayed in the 1972 film. Jeanne Kronsoble (…) said (…) « When people build houses and they come here, they need art on their walls. » But despite this prosperity, the 40-year pain has managed to hang on, because so many people saw a fictional film. « There are lots of people in Rabun County that would be just as happy if they never heard the word, ‘Deliverance’ again, » Darnell said. CNN

The portrait of mountain people as toothless, sexual deviants in a “country of nine-fingered people” was too much for many Southerners to accept. (…) By the time director John Boorman brought “Deliverance” to the big screen in 1972 starring Burt Reynolds as Lewis and Jon Voight as Ed, the damage to the South’s reputation was in full force. (…) Ironically, the movie’s most memorable line, “Squeal like a pig!” was never a part of the book. It was allegedly improvised by the actor during filming. But the South wanted to still promote Dickey, an accomplished Atlanta author, so articles in the Columbia Record and other South Carolina and Georgia newspapers frequently featured Dickey’s novel. The film version of “Deliverance” was also honored at the Atlanta film festival. (…) Although many people in the region still bristle at the movie’s portrayal of locals as ignorant hillbillies, there were some major benefits to the book and film. (…) Both helped create the more than $20 million rafting and outdoor sports industry along the Chattooga River in North Georgia. In 2012, the national media descended on Rabun County again when reporters quickly learned the film’s 40th anniversary was going to be celebrated during the Chattooga River Festival. (…) The Rabun County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau also pointed out that tourism brings in more than $42 million a year in revenue, which makes for a huge surplus for a county whose operating budget was about $17 million at the time. (…) “It is hard to believe that 40 years have passed since this movie first brought fame to the Northeast Georgia Mountains,” Tanya Jacobson-Smith wrote on the grill’s website promoting the festival. “Much has happened over the years here in Rabun County Georgia and around the world. Some good, some bad. Some still believe the movie was a poor portrayal of this county and it’s people. Other’s believe it is at least part of what has helped this region survive.” (…) “When ‘Deliverance’ was released in 1972, it was for many outside the community their first introduction to the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the ways of the people living and working in their shadow,” she wrote. “Many of us (myself included) saw the breathtaking beauty of this area for the first time via the big screen. We caught a glimpse into the lives of the people who inhabit this place, some good and some not so good. There are those who believe that ‘Deliverance’ made the mountain people seem ‘backwards, uneducated, scary, and even deviant.’ I believe there were also many who, like myself, saw a people of great strength, caring and compassion. A community knit together by hardship, sharing and caring for each other and willing to help anyone who came along. (…) Most importantly ‘Deliverance’ introduced the world to the natural beauty of this mountain region, the unforgettable sounds of the Appalachian music and the wild excitement of river rafting. Drawn here by what they saw on the big screen, tourists flocked to the area to see and experience for themselves the good things they had seen in the movie. (…) “Forty years later, people from all over the world still come to this area to experience the beauty and simplicity of mountain living,” she wrote. “It is here in these beautiful mountains that ‘strangers’ find a vibrant community of lifelong residents and newcomers, working together to maintain a quality of life that has been lost in much of today’s world.” (…) But there was also some growing pains. Thousands of “suburbanites” flocked to the river in search of whitewater thrills and exhibited what author Anthony Harkins calls “the Deliverance syndrome.” These individuals showed the “same lack of respect and reverence for the river that the characters in the film had displayed,” Harkins wrote, adding “to the shame of local guides, some even would make pig squeals when they reached the section of the river where the rape scene had been filmed.” Some of those individuals paid a price. “Seventeen people drowned on the river between 1972 and 1975, most with excessive blood-alcohol levels, until new regulations were imposed when the river was officially designated Wild and Scenic in 1974,” Harkins wrote. Stacey Edson

Since its release, [Deliverance] has provoked passionate critiques, inspired different analyses, and has become a cult phenomenon. The imagery, stereotypes, and symbols produced by the film still inform popular perceptions of the US South, even by those who have never actually watched it. (…) The “rise of the Sunbelt” brought Dixie economic and political power, creating a need for the reconfiguration of the traditional North vs. South identity dynamic. World War II government defense spending led to an impressive economic development of the region. The New South economy and the migration of people and jobs below the Mason-Dixon line produced rapid urbanization and industrialization, contributing to the rise of education and income levels and an upheaval to the system of racial segregation. (…) If the 1970s delivered films and television series that presented southern white working-class men as charming rebels, it also solidified the image of a degenerate « race » of underclass southern whites, marking the rise of the redneck nightmare movie. (…)According to The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, “Deliverance has powerfully shaped national perceptions of Appalachia, the South, and indeed all people and places perceived as ‘backwoods.’” It has done so, in no small part, by ushering in a host of similar films inaugurating a new subgenre in Hollywood and independent US cinema. (…) It has been spoofed, parodied, and referenced in countless movies, TV shows, and cartoons since its release. Furthermore, references to the film still serve as shorthand for poor white (especially southern) backwardness and degeneracy. (…) Deliverance seems to be a curse and a blessing to everyone and everything involved with it. It brought money and tourism to the region, but it also caused ecological problems and the death of several people who tried to emulate the film’s stars. It brought James Dickey fame and fortune but, according to his son, it also caused great personal and emotional damage to him and his family. It simultaneously popularized and stigmatized banjo music. And it helped create a fascination with (and prejudices against) poor, rural southern whites. Maybe that is quite fitting for a story that seemed to condemn while being inescapably part of a complicated moment in American history.Isabel Machado

Long before moviegoers watched in horror as actor Ned Beatty was forced to strip off his clothes and told to “squeal like a pig” during a film set in the rural mountains of North Georgia, there was the novel by Atlanta writer and poet James Dickey that started it all.

It’s been 45 years since “Deliverance” first hit the book shelves across this nation, but the profound impact that the tale of four suburban men canoeing down the dangerous rapids of a remote Georgia river and encountering a pair of deranged mountain men can still be felt today.

When the book was first released back in April of 1970, the reaction was definitely mixed, to say the least. Most critics praised the adventurous tale, describing the novel as “riveting entertainment” or a “monument to tall stories.”

The New York Times called the book a “double-clutching whopper” of a story that was a “weekend athlete’s nightmare.”

“Four men decide to paddle two canoes down the rapids of a river in northern Georgia to get one last look at pure wilderness before the river is dammed up and ‘the real estate people get hold of it,’” the New York Times book review stated in 1970.

But to the shock of the reader, the whitewater adventure turns into a struggle for survival when the character Bobby Trippe is brutally sodomized by a mountain man while his friend Ed Gentry is tied to a nearby tree.

“In the middle of the second day of the outing, two of the campers pull over to the riverbank for a rest,” the New York Times wrote in 1970. “Out of the woods wander two scrofulous hillbillies with a shotgun, and proceed to assault the campers with a casual brutality that leaves the reader squirming.

“It’s a bad situation inside an impossible one wrapped up in a hopeless one, with rapids crashing along between sheer cliffs and bullets zinging down from overhead. A most dangerous game.”

The New Republic described “Deliverance” as a powerful book that readers would not soon forget.

“I wondered where the excitement was that intrigued Lewis so much; everything in Oree was sleepy and hookwormy and ugly, and most of all, inconsequential. Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place.”

“How a man acts when shot by an arrow, what it feels like to scale a cliff or to capsize, the ironic psychology of fear,” The New Republic review stated. “These things are conveyed with remarkable descriptive writing.”

But the Southern Review probably said it best by stating that “Deliverance” touched on the basic “questions that haunt modern urban man.”

The book spent 26 weeks on the New York Times best-selling hardback list, and 16 weeks on that newspaper’s paperback list.

Within two years, it had achieved its eighth printing and sold almost 2 million copies.

The novel was having an immediate impact on the image of northern Georgia, according to the book, “Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878” by author Emily Satterwhite.

“Dickey’s novel created for readers an Appalachia that served as the site of a collective ‘nightmare,’ to use a term adopted by several of Dickey’s reviewers,” Satterwhite wrote. “The rape of city men by leering ‘hicks,’ central to the novel… became almost synonymous with popular conceptions of the mountain South.”

The book is a tall tale written by a man raised in a wealthy neighborhood in Atlanta, who both loved and feared the mountains of North Georgia, according to Satterwhite.

“Dickey’s father, James II, was a lawyer who loved hunting and cockfighting; his North Georgia farm served as a refuge from his wife, her family inheritance and the Buckhead mansion and servants that her wealth afforded them even in the depths of the Great Depression,” Satterwhite wrote, adding that James Dickey, like his father, was also uncomfortable with his family’s wealth. “Dickey preferred to claim that he grew up in the mountains. He attributed his blustery aggressiveness to his ‘North Georgia folk heritage’ and averred, ‘My people are all hillbillies. I’m only second-generation city.’”

But that was far from the truth.

“Though Dickey’s ancestors had indeed lived in mountainous Fannin County, Georgia, they were not the plain folks he made them out to be,” Satterwhite wrote. “He failed to acknowledge that they were slaveholders and among the largest landowners and wealthiest residents of the county. Dickey’s romantic — and racist — vision of Appalachia as a place apart stayed with him his entire life.”

Dickey’s conflicting feeling about these so-called “mountain people” of North Georgia is evident in many of the conversations between two of the novel’s main characters, graphic artist Ed Gentry and outdoor survivalist Lewis Medlock.

In the beginning of the book, Lewis attempts to describe to Ed, the narrator of the novel and the character who is generally believed to be loosely based on Dickey himself, what makes the mountains of northern Georgia so special.

Lewis insists that there “may be something important in the hills.”

But Ed quickly fires back, “I don’t mind going down a few rapids with you and drinking a little whiskey by a campfire. But I don’t give a fiddler’s f*** about those hills.”

Lewis continues to try to persuade Ed by telling him about a recent trip he took with another friend, Shad Mackey, who got lost in these very same mountains.

“I happened to look around, and there was a fellow standing there looking at me,” Lewis said. “‘What you want, boy down around here?’ he said. He was skinny, and had on overall pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I told him I was going down the river with another guy, and that I was waiting for Shad to show up.”

The man who stepped out of the woods was a moonshiner who, to Lewis’ surprise, offered to help.

“‘You say you got a man back up there hunting with a bow and arrow. Does he know what’s up there?’ he asked me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s rougher than a night in jail in south Georgia,’ he said, ‘and I know what I’m talking about. You have any idea whereabouts he is?’ I said no, ‘just up that way someplace, the last time I saw him.’”

What happened next opened Lewis’ eyes to these mountain people, he told Ed.

“The fellow stood up and went over to his boy, who was about fifteen. He talked to him for a while, and then came about halfway back to me before he turned around and said, ‘Son, go find that man.’

“The boy didn’t say a thing. He went and got a flashlight and an old single-shot twenty-two. He picked up a handful of bullets from a box and put them in his pocket. He called his dog, and then he just faded away.”

Several hours later, the boy returned with Shad, who had broken his leg. When Lewis finishes his story, it’s obvious the tale means very little to Ed.

“That fellow wasn’t commanding his son against his will,” Lewis said. “The boy just knew what to do. He walked out into the dark.”

Ed quickly asks, “So?”

“So, we’re lesser men, Ed,” Lewis said. “I’m sorry, but we are.”

“From the ubiquitous rendition of the ‘Dueling Banjos’ theme song to allude to danger from hicks to bumper stickers for tourists reading, ‘Paddle faster, I hear banjoes,’ the novel and film have created artifacts that many of us encounter on an almost weekly basis.”

When the pair reaches the fictitious mountain town of Oree, Georgia, in the novel, Ed is clearly even less impressed.

“An old man with a straw hat and work shirt appeared at Lewis’ window, talking in. He looked like a hillbilly in some badly cast movie, a character actor too much in character to be believed. I wondered where the excitement was that intrigued Lewis so much; everything in Oree was sleepy and hookwormy and ugly, and most of all, inconsequential. Nobody worth a damn could ever come from such a place.”

As Lewis continues to negotiate with the mountain men, Ed becomes even more harsh in his description of Oree and its residents.

“There is always something wrong with people in the country, I thought. In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment maybe. But there was something else. You’d think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn’t have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong.

“The catching of an arm in a tractor park somewhere off in the middle of a field where nothing happened but that the sun blazed back more fiercely down the open mouth of one’s screams. And so many snakebites deep in the woods as one stepped over a rotten log, so many domestic animals suddenly turning and crushing one against the splintering side of a barn stall. I wanted none of it, and I didn’t want to be around where it happened either. But I was there, and there was no way for me to escape, except by water, from the country of nine-fingered people.”

The South Squeals Like a Pig

The portrait of mountain people as toothless, sexual deviants in a “country of nine-fingered people” was too much for many Southerners to accept.

“The consequences of fictional representation have never been more powerful for the imagination of mountainness — or perhaps even for southernness, ruralness, and ‘primitiveness’ more generically — than in the case of ‘Deliverance,’” Satterwhite wrote.

By the time director John Boorman brought “Deliverance” to the big screen in 1972 starring Burt Reynolds as Lewis and Jon Voight as Ed, the damage to the South’s reputation was in full force.

The movie, which was primarily filmed in Rabun County in North Georgia during the summer of 1971, grossed about $6.5 million in its first year and was considered a great success at home and internationally.

“Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the thoroughness with which ‘Deliverance,’ transformed by Dickey and director John Boorman into a film classic, has imbricated itself into Americans’ understanding and worldview,” Satterwhite wrote. “From the ubiquitous rendition of the ‘Dueling Banjos’ theme song to allude to danger from hicks to bumper stickers for tourists reading, ‘Paddle faster, I hear banjoes,’ the novel and film have created artifacts that many of us encounter on an almost weekly basis.”

Ironically, the movie’s most memorable line, “Squeal like a pig!” was never a part of the book. It was allegedly improvised by the actor during filming.

But the South wanted to still promote Dickey, an accomplished Atlanta author, so articles in the Columbia Record and other South Carolina and Georgia newspapers frequently featured Dickey’s novel. The film version of “Deliverance” was also honored at the Atlanta film festival.

“Southern hopes for self-promotion were evident at the film’s premiere in Atlanta,” Satterhite wrote. “Dickey leaned over to say to Jimmy Carter, then the governor: ‘Ain’t no junior league movie is it, Governor?’ ‘It’s pretty rough,’ Carter agreed, ‘but it’s good for Georgia.’ Carter paused. ‘It’s good for Georgia. I hope.’”

However, the success of “Deliverance” had such an impact on the Peach State, Carter decided to create a state film office in 1973 to ensure Georgia kept landing movie roles.

As a result, the film and video industry has contributed more than $5 billion to the state’s economy since the Georgia Film Commission was established.

But the release of “Deliverance” was, without question, a difficult time for rural Southerners, wrote Western Kentucky University professor Anthony Harkins, author of “Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon.”

The mountaineers of “Deliverance” were “crippled misfits and savage sodomizers of the North Georgia wilderness” who terrorize the foursome of Atlanta canoeists who simply want to run the rapids of the fictitious Cahulawassee River.

“Indisputably the most influential film of the modern era in shaping national perceptions of southern mountaineers and rural life in general, Deliverance’s portrayal of degenerate, imbecilic, and sexually voracious predators bred fear into several generations of Americans,” Harkins wrote. “As film scholar Pat Arnow only partly facetiously argued in 1991, the film ‘is still the greatest incentive for many non-Southerners to stay on the Interstate.’”

“As film scholar Pat Arnow only partly facetiously argued in 1991, the film ‘is still the greatest incentive for many non-Southerners to stay on the Interstate.’”

In fact, Harkins points out that Daniel Roper of the North Georgia Journal described the movie’s devastating local effect as “Deliverance did for them [North Georgians] what ‘Jaws’ did for sharks.”

“The film’s infamous scenes of sodomy at gunpoint and of a retarded albino boy lustily playing his banjo became such instantly recognizable shorthand for demeaning references to rural poor whites that comedians needed to say only ‘squeal like a pig’ or hum the opening notes of the film’s guitar banjo duet to gain an immediate visceral reaction from a studio audience,” Harkins writes.

Harkins believes that’s not at all what Dickey intended in writing both the book and the movie’s screenplay.

“To (the character) Lewis (and Dickey), the mountain folk’s very backwardness and social isolation has allowed them to retain a physical and mental toughness and to preserve a code of commitment to family and kin that has long ago been lost in the rush to a commodified existence,” Harkins wrote. “Lewis praised the ‘values’ passed down from father to son.”

But all of that meaning appeared to be lost in the film, Harkins wrote. Instead, Hollywood was much more interested in the horrific tale and captivating adventure of traveling down a North Georgia river being chased by crazed hillbillies.

The film was about the shock and fear of such an incident in the rural mountains that enthralled moviegoers.

“The film explicitly portrays Lewis (Burt Reynolds) shooting the rapist through the back with an arrow and the man’s shocked expression as he sees the blood smeared projectile protruding from his chest just before he dies violently,” Harkins wrote.

Surprisingly, Dickey seemed to thoroughly enjoy that scene in the film during the movie’s New York premiere, Harkins writes.

“Known for his outrageous antics and drunken public appearances, (Dickey) is said to have shouted out in the crowded theater, ‘Kill the son of a bitch!’ at the moment Lewis aims his fatal arrow,” Harkins wrote. “And then ‘Hot damn’ once the arrow found its mark.”

Many years later, Ned Beatty, the actor in the famous rape scene wrote an editorial for the New York Times called “Suppose Men Feared Rape.”

“‘Squeal like a pig.’ How many times has that been shouted, said or whispered to me since then?” wrote Beatty, who, according to Atlanta’s Creative Loafing would reply, “When was the last time you got kicked by an old man?”

Beatty wrote the editorial amid the outcry of 1989’s high-profile Central Park jogger rape case, and offered his experience with the snide catcalls, Creative Loafing reported.

“Somewhere between their shouts and my threats lies a kernel of truth about how men feel about rape,” he wrote. “My guess is, we want to be distanced from it. Our last choice would be to identify with the victim. If we felt we could truly be victims of rape, that fear would be a better deterrent than the death penalty.”

The Shock in Rabun County, Georgia

The rape of Ned Beatty’s character was easily the most memorable scene in the film, and, needless to say, many of the residents in Rabun County who were interviewed after the movie was released were less than thrilled.

“Resentment grew even while the film was being made,” Harkins wrote. “As word of how the mountaineers were being portrayed spread, (James Dickey’s son) Christopher Dickey, who was staying with his family in a low-budget motel and had more contact with the local residents acting or working on the set than did Boorman and the lead actors staying in chalets at a nearby golf resort, began to fear for his safety. Shaped by a century of media depictions of brutally violent mountaineers, he worried that some ‘real mountain men’ with ‘real guns’ might ‘teach some of these movie people a lesson.’”

Although many people in the region still bristle at the movie’s portrayal of locals as ignorant hillbillies, there were some major benefits to the book and film.

“That river doesn’t care about you. It’ll knock your brains out. Most of the people going up there don’t know about whitewater rivers. They are just out for a lark, just like those characters in ‘Deliverance.’ They wouldn’t have gone up there if I hadn’t written the book.”

Both helped create the more than $20 million rafting and outdoor sports industry along the Chattooga River in North Georgia.

In 2012, the national media descended on Rabun County again when reporters quickly learned the film’s 40th anniversary was going to be celebrated during the Chattooga River Festival.

“The movie, ‘Deliverance’ made tourist dollars flow into the area, but there was one memorable, horrifying male rape scene that lasted a little more than four minutes, but has lasted 40 years inside the hearts and minds of the people who live here,” CNN reported in 2012.

Rabun County Commissioner Stanley “Butch” Darnell told the media he was disgusted by the way the region was depicted in the film.

“We were portrayed as ignorant, backward, scary, deviant, redneck hillbillies,” he told CNN. “That stuck with us through all these years and in fact that was probably furthest from the truth. These people up here are a very caring, lovely people.”

“There are lots of people in Rabun County that would be just as happy if they never heard the word, ‘Deliverance’ again,” he added.

The news media interviewed everyone, including Rabun County resident Billy Redden, who as a teen was asked to play the “Banjo boy” in the film.

“I don’t think it should bother them. I think they just need to start realizing that it’s just a movie,” Redden, who still lives in Rabun County and works at Walmart, told CNN in 2012. “It’s not like it’s real.”

The Rabun County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau also pointed out that tourism brings in more than $42 million a year in revenue, which makes for a huge surplus for a county whose operating budget was about $17 million at the time.

Several local businesses embraced the 2012 festival including the owners of the Tallulah Gorge Grill.

The Tallulah Gorge is the very gorge that Jon Voight climbed out of near the end of the 1972 film and the owners of the Tallulah Gorge Grill wanted to celebrate that milestone.

“It is hard to believe that 40 years have passed since this movie first brought fame to the Northeast Georgia Mountains,” Tanya Jacobson-Smith wrote on the grill’s website promoting the festival. “Much has happened over the years here in Rabun County Georgia and around the world. Some good, some bad. Some still believe the movie was a poor portrayal of this county and it’s people. Other’s believe it is at least part of what has helped this region survive.”

Both thoughts are justified, Jacobson-Smith wrote.

“When ‘Deliverance’ was released in 1972, it was for many outside the community their first introduction to the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the ways of the people living and working in their shadow,” she wrote. “Many of us (myself included) saw the breathtaking beauty of this area for the first time via the big screen. We caught a glimpse into the lives of the people who inhabit this place, some good and some not so good. There are those who believe that ‘Deliverance’ made the mountain people seem ‘backwards, uneducated, scary, and even deviant.’ I believe there were also many who, like myself, saw a people of great strength, caring and compassion. A community knit together by hardship, sharing and caring for each other and willing to help anyone who came along.”

She wrote that, as in any community, if people look hard enough and thoroughly examine its residents, they will find some bad, but most often they will find “a greater good that outshines the bad.”

“That is certainly the case here in the Northeast Georgia Mountains,” she wrote. “Most importantly ‘Deliverance’ introduced the world to the natural beauty of this mountain region, the unforgettable sounds of the Appalachian music and the wild excitement of river rafting. Drawn here by what they saw on the big screen, tourists flocked to the area to see and experience for themselves the good things they had seen in the movie.”

As a result, tourists filled hotels and campgrounds to capacity, tasted the local fare in restaurants and cafes and discovered the thrill of swimming in, or paddling on, the state’s beautiful rivers and lakes.

“Forty years later, people from all over the world still come to this area to experience the beauty and simplicity of mountain living,” she wrote. “It is here in these beautiful mountains that ‘strangers’ find a vibrant community of lifelong residents and newcomers, working together to maintain a quality of life that has been lost in much of today’s world.”

Over the years, Rabun County and surrounding North Georgia communities have embraced these changes. Some parts of the area have become a playground for high-end homeowners with multi-million-dollar lakefront property.

But there was also some growing pains.

Thousands of “suburbanites” flocked to the river in search of whitewater thrills and exhibited what author Anthony Harkins calls “the Deliverance syndrome.”

These individuals showed the “same lack of respect and reverence for the river that the characters in the film had displayed,” Harkins wrote, adding “to the shame of local guides, some even would make pig squeals when they reached the section of the river where the rape scene had been filmed.”

Some of those individuals paid a price.

“Seventeen people drowned on the river between 1972 and 1975, most with excessive blood-alcohol levels, until new regulations were imposed when the river was officially designated Wild and Scenic in 1974,” Harkins wrote.

Ironically, some people like to point out that “Deliverance” author James Dickey tried to warn people prior to his death in 1997 about their need to respect the rivers located in the mountains of North Georgia.

“That river doesn’t care about you. It’ll knock your brains out,” Dickey told the Associated Press in 1973. “Most of the people going up there don’t know about whitewater rivers. They are just out for a lark, just like those characters in ‘Deliverance.’ They wouldn’t have gone up there if I hadn’t written the book. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t patrol the river. But it just makes me feel awful.”

One look at the landscape and you know why people come here — running white water, along a portion of the Appalachian Trail.

This is Rabun County, Georgia. It was the residents’ own best-kept secret until the world discovered it by way of a 1972 movie.

The movie, « Deliverance, » made tourist dollars flow into the area, but there was one memorable, horrifying male rape scene that lasted a little more than four minutes, but has lasted 40 years inside the hearts and minds of the people who live here.

Locals say the film painted the county’s residents as deviant, uneducated mountain folk.

« That stuck with us through all these years and in fact that was probably furthest from the truth. These people up here are a very caring, lovely people. »

This weekend, the film’s 40th anniversary will be celebrated at the Chattooga River Festival. A re-release of the iconic film on Blu-ray by Warner Home Video will play at the local drive-in on Saturday.

The film tells the story of four big-city guys who take a drive up to northern Georgia to canoe the white water of the Chattooga River that separates Georgia from South Carolina. It’s remembered for the dueling banjo scene at the beginning of the film, where one man, played by Ronnie Cox, plays a duet with a local teen, who is portrayed as inbred and mentally challenged.

« Dueling banjos, of course, was iconic, but then there’s the rape scene, too, » Cox said. « And for a lot of people it became a tough pill to swallow.

« Some people, I think they missed the artistic essence of it (the film), the value of it. »

But it’s the rape scene that seems to dominate any conversation about the film.

« You were in the middle of the Bible Belt, the biggest thing we had gong back then is we had square dancing at the Mountain City Playhouse, » said Darnell, the county commissioner.

But many people, like Billy Redden, say the local folks should put this behind them. The 40th anniversary means a lot to him. He’s 56 now, but 40 years ago, he was a student who was asked to play the « Banjo boy » after the film’s producers found him on a visit to his high school.

« I don’t think it should bother them. I think they just need to start realizing that it’s just a movie. It’s not like it’s real, » said Redden, who still lives in Rabun County.

But despite any negative stereotypes, the Rabun County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau says more than a quarter-million people flock to the area each year to shoot the same rapids they saw come to life on the big screen.

« It essentially started the white-water rafting industry in the Southeast, » said Larry Mashburn, who owns Southeastern Expeditions, a rafting company.

County officials say tourism brings in $42 million a year in revenue, which makes for a huge surplus for a county whose operating budget is about $17 million. These days, the county has an 80% high school graduation rate, and its average home price is more than $300,000.

« It’s allowed us to do things with our education system, with all these different services that we offer, we could not have offered, » Darnell said.

The area has become a playground for high-end homeowners with lakefront property in the multimillion-dollar range on places like Lake Burton, which has 62 miles of shoreline.

« Once people come to Rabun County, they don’t want to leave, » said Debra Butler, a real estate agent. « This is a lifestyle that you have here. It’s a way of life. ‘Deliverance’ depicts a backwoods, inbred kind of community. That is not Rabun County. »

Indeed, downtown shops and art galleries convey an image far from anything portrayed in the 1972 film. Jeanne Kronsoble’s Main Street Gallery in Clayton shows off a wide range of contemporary folk artists, many self-taught. She’s been open for 28 years.

« I became interested in contemporary folk art because of the things I’d seen up here, » she said. « When people build houses and they come here, they need art on their walls. »

Most believe « Deliverance » got it all started.

But despite this prosperity, the 40-year pain has managed to hang on, because so many people saw a fictional film. « There are lots of people in Rabun County that would be just as happy if they never heard the word, ‘Deliverance’ again, » Darnell said.

Voir également:

Revisiting Deliverance
The Sunbelt South, the 1970s Masculinity Crisis, and the Emergence of the Redneck Nightmare Genre
Isabel Machado
June 19, 2017

1Introduction

On May 1, 2013, Vice President Joe Biden delivered the keynote speech at the Voices Against Violence event in Washington, D.C. Even though the VP had written the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, and therefore had the authority to speak about the subject, he decided to add a clumsy personal touch to his address:

You often hear men say, “Why don’t they just leave?” [. . .] And I ask them, how many of you seen the movie Deliverance? And every man will raise his hand. And I’ll say, what’s the one scene you remember in Deliverance? And every man here knows exactly what scene to think of. And I’ll say, “After those guys tied that one guy in that tree and raped him, man raped him, in that film. Why didn’t the guy go to the sheriff? What would you have done? “Well, I’d go back home get my gun. I’d come back and find him.” Why wouldn’t you go to the sheriff? Why? Well, the reason why is they are ashamed. They are embarrassed. I say, why do you think so many women that get raped, so many don’t report it? They don’t want to get raped again by the system.1

The plot of Deliverance (1972) is relatively simple and so familiar that the vice president of the United States used it as shorthand to convey the humiliation and horror of sexual assault in the celebration of the anniversary of an institution dedicated to help victims of domestic abuse. (In the film, four middle-class suburban men paddle down the Cahulawassee River to explore the Georgia Mountains’ wilderness before it is flooded by the construction of a dam. Their adventure turns into a nightmare when they come across two “inbred hillbillies” and one of the canoeists is violently raped. In order to survive the southern “heart of darkness,” the suburbanites must give in to their primal instincts and break a series of laws and moral codes.) But what exactly does Vice Pres. Biden’s reference to the film mean? Is Deliverance a story about survivalism? An ecological cautionary tale? An allegory of the rise of the Sunbelt? A thinly veiled homoerotic fantasy?

Since its release, the film has provoked passionate critiques, inspired different analyses, and has become a cult phenomenon. The imagery, stereotypes, and symbols produced by the film still inform popular perceptions of the US South, even by those who have never actually watched it. Readings of Deliverance have tended to privilege one particular interpretation, failing to fully grasp its relevance. The movie is a rich cultural text that provides historians with multiple ways to analyze the South, particularly concepts such as southern identity and masculinity.

What makes a film an important, iconic, cultural text? It is not simply a matter of popularity at the moment of its release. Deliverance premiered in New York on July 30, 1972, and was quite successful that year, but so were Deep Throat and What’s Up Doc? And it did not even closely approach the box office numbers achieved by The Godfather. The Blaxsploitation classic Super Fly (1972) premiered the same week and, by August 9, had made $145,000. Deliverance earned almost a third of that, making $45,023.2 The initial Variety review described it as a “heavy” and uneven version of a novel that would “divide audiences, making promotion a major challenge” for Warner Brothers.3 The two New York Times critics who reviewed Deliverance appear to have watched different films. Although Vincent Canby had some kind words about the film’s cinematography and performances, he calls it a “an action melodrama that doesn’t trust its action to speak louder than words.” Stephen Farber, however, saw an “uncompromising adventure movie” that “also happens to be the most stunning piece of moviemaking released this year.”4

Although other, more positive images of working-class white southerners were also emerging in the late 1970s, the « redneck nightmare » trope popularized by Deliverance became iconic and enduring.

This essay argues that an important cultural text needs to fulfill three criteria: 1) It reinforces or reworks ideas, images, and stereotypes of the past. 2) It captures the sociocultural spirit and anxieties of the present. And 3) it leaves a legacy that informs future representations. Deliverance accomplishes all of those. It dialogues with past representations of underclass white southerners; reflects and questions the historical moment in which it was produced and consumed; and, to this day, affects the way the region and its inhabitants are perceived and depicted. It can be read as a reflection of the reconfiguration of southern identity during the rise of the Sunbelt, but also as an expression of the perceived masculinity crisis of the 1970s. In addition, although other, more positive images of working-class white southerners were also emerging in the 1970s, the “ redneck nightmare” trope popularized by Deliverance became iconic and enduring.5

In general, studies of the South in film tend to either focus on a specific period and analyze how a particular set of films represent certain views or ideas, or to survey a larger time frame and show how images and perceptions have changed.6 This article proposes instead to analyze a single film, trying to glean from it the sociocultural climate of the period in which it was produced and consumed. Yet, it also connects Deliverance with past stereotypes, archetypes, and discourses, while considering how it affected future representations of underclass white southerners. It is not the objective of this study, however, to argue that this was the only portrayal of the South in celluloid in that period. Other contemporary texts presented very different images of the region.7

2The South as “Other”

In his seminal 1985 article about horror movies, film critic Robin Wood discusses how “the Other” in those texts has to be rejected and eliminated or rendered safe by assimilation. Wood contends that Otherness “functions not simply as something external to the culture or to the self, but also as what is repressed (but never destroyed) in the self and projected outwards in order to be hated and disowned.”8 He uses the depictions of Native Americans and white settlers in classical Westerns as examples of this process. Yet, strong parallels also exist in relation to representations of the South.

Scholars from different disciplines have demonstrated how the South and southerners have played the fundamental role of the “Other” in the establishment of an elevated national identity. Historian James Cobb has pointed out that the tendency to compare South and North “and to see the latter as the normative standard for the entire nation” can be dated at least as far back as to the earliest days of US independence.9 Geographer David R Jansson sees this process as “internal orientalism.”10 Film critic Godfrey Cheshire places Hollywood in the role of colonizer, while Southern Cultures editor Larry Griffin argues that there are as many different “Americas” as there are “Souths,” therefore, we need to question why a particular paradigm is chosen and think about the implications of that choice.11 In “The Quest for the Central Theme in Southern History,” David L. Smiley, suggests: “Perhaps a more fruitful question for students of the American South would be not what the South is or has been, but why the idea of the South began, and how it came to be accepted as axiomatic among Americans.”12 The same advice can also be applied to analyses of representations of Dixie in popular culture.

The stigmatization of a group as “the Other” always implies a relation of power.13 The negotiation of power in Deliverance happens not only on an interregional level, but also between classes. The new, educated, and “redeemed” Sunbelt white South needed to construct its own “Other.” In the post–civil rights era, African Americans, the other “Others,” seemed to be off limits. Hence, what better demographic group to serve this function than the historically stigmatized poor white southerners?14

3The Exoticization of “Poor White Trash”

They are “crackers,” “hillbillies,” and especially “rednecks,”‑all pejoratives bestowed by representatives of a long succession of southern hegemonies, then consumed and broadcast by Yankees who share hegemonic understanding and control communications media.15

Poor white trash, not a nickel in my jeans
Poor white trash, don’t know what lovin’ means
Poor white trash, never had no fun
Poor white trash, ain’t got no one.
In the swamp I live, in the swamp I die.
For poor white trash no one will cry.16

Underclass southern whites complicate our understanding of US racial dynamics by challenging two important concepts: white supremacy and white privilege. The novel Deliverance describes the North Georgia region as “the country of the nine-fingered people.”17 James Dickey’s son, Christopher, says that this is “because there’s so much inbreeding and so many bad accidents (in the region) that everybody’s missing something.”18 In the film’s DVD audio commentary, director John Boorman notes that the people he encountered in the Georgia Mountains were “all hillbillies” whose “notorious” inbreeding he maladroitly explains: “The reason, I discovered up there, is that these are the descendants of white people who married Indians, and they were then ostracized by the Indians and the whites, and so they had to turn in on themselves, and this strange, hostile, inward-looking group grew up around that history. And you can see, in some of those people’s faces, traces of the Indian.”19 Although it is unclear where the director got this information, he is inadvertently employing the same rationale used to stigmatize and oppress underclass white southerners in the past.

The focus on the appearance of poor whites is indicative of the association between poverty and physical deformity and the tendency to see poor whites as practically an inferior race.

Even prior to the Civil War, abolitionists and proslavery groups portrayed poor southern whites as people outside of a respectable white society.20 Both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854) and white supremacist Daniel R. Hundley’s Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860) have chapters entitled “Poor White Trash.” Stowe believed that slavery not only corrupted the “black working classes,” but also produced “a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe.” She notes that this “inconceivably brutal” group of whites resemble “some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way.”21Hundley sees underclass southern whites as the “laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the Earth” whose appearance was: lank, lean, angular, and bony, with . . . sallow complexion, awkward manners, and a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.”22 The focus on the appearance of poor whites is indicative of the association between poverty and physical deformity and the tendency to see poor whites as practically an inferior race. This rationale allowed southerners to ignore the structural barriers to upward mobility in a slave society. Hunley blames “bad blood” and not the “peculiar institution” for the degeneracy of poor whites.23

In 1926 Arthur H. Estabrook and Ivan E. McDougle published Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe, which examined a mixed-population group in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western Virginia, not all that far from Deliverance country.24 According to Eastabrook and McDougle, “the white folks look down on them, as do the negroes, and this, with their dark skin color, has caused segregation from the general community.”25 As we have seen, Deliverance director John Boorman gave a similar explanation to the strange appearance of the people he used as extras in his film.

The general acceptance of eugenics laws and involuntary sterilization in the early twentieth century informed public perception of poor whites as potentially dangerous.26 Yet, the stigmatization of underclass whites also had some relatively positive outcomes. In 1909 John D. Rockefeller Sr. granted $1,000,000 to the creation of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease. Although they did not necessarily represent underclass southern whites negatively, hookworm crusaders provided one more instance in which this group of people would be perceived as a socially marginal “Other.”27 During the New Deal, another benevolent stereotype of underclass white southerners captured the country’s imagination as Rexford Tugwell instructed Roy Striker “to tell people about the lower third‑how ill-fed, ill-clothed and ill-housed they are.”28 In the hands of talented Farm Securities Administration (FSA) photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, southern tenants and sharecroppers were transformed into icons of New Deal populism, but the headlines accompanying the powerful images highlighted their exoticism: “Poverty’s Prisoners,” “Uncensored Views of Sharecroppers’ Misery,” or “Is This America?”29

Social realism in the US was not only manifested in the FSA photographs. The Depression also generated socially engaged literature, also known as “sharecropper realism,” which offered dignified depictions of southern sharecroppers.30 At the same time, however, poor southern whites were popularized by a different set of novels: the Southern Gothic literary tradition, which influenced the perception of poor white southerners not only on the printed page, but also on movie screens.31 It can be argued that the work of Flannery O’Connor, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, among others, provided a more direct antecedent for the redneck nightmare genre.

Ellen Glasgow criticized the Southern Gothic School for its exclusive focus on negative aspects of life in the South and for presenting its Gothic elements as pseudo-realism.

These images, archetypes, and stereotypes, some dating back to the nineteenth century, have served as a template for the haunting images of the mountain people in Deliverance. The “creepy banjo boy” played by Billy Redden provides one of the most iconic images of the film. The scene is praised in the Variety review as a “very touching banjo and giutar [sic] duet between [Ronnie] Cox and a retarded.”32 According to J. W. Williamson, some of the local people “felt queasy about the filming of Mrs. Webb’s retarded granddaughter and the use of Billy Redden, who played the inbred banjoist.”33 Redden was a special-education student at the time of the shooting who would later enjoy the status of a local celebrity, having his picture taken with tourists and even resuming his “Hollywood career” three decades later by making a cameo playing banjo on Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003).34 Much has been said about the “authenticity” of the scene, but little attention has been paid to the fact that the character is described in a second draft of film’s screenplay as “probably a half-wit, likely from a family inbred to the point of imbecility and Albinism.”35 Redden’s “face was powdered and his head was shaven for the part” to accentuate his exoticism.36 In the audio commentary over the scene with Mrs. Webb and her grandchild, director John Boorman states: “Look at this character now, this woman, look, the way they live there, that was just absolutely how it was. No set up in any way. It was just us peering through a window with a camera.”37 He ignores the process of pre-production that selected people and locations that fit the screenplay’s descriptions, the ideas and ambiance the filmmakers wanted to convey, and their assumptions about underclass rural southerners.

Ellen Glasgow criticized the Southern Gothic School for its exclusive focus on negative aspects of life in the South and for presenting its Gothic elements as pseudo-realism.38 Similar criticism has been made of Deliverance’s portrayal of the Georgia mountain folk. Former mayor of Clayton, Georgia, Edward Cannon Norton, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1990 that he “despises Deliverance” for the way it depicted his people, noting the film is “too filthy” and it “pictures us as a sorry lot of people.” S. K. Graham, who wrote the article quoting Mr. Norton, also notes that the film “played to every stereotype the mountaineers have tried to live down.”39

4A Sunbelt Allegory?

The “rise of the Sunbelt” brought Dixie economic and political power, creating a need for the reconfiguration of the traditional North vs. South identity dynamic. World War II government defense spending led to an impressive economic development of the region. The New South economy and the migration of people and jobs below the Mason-Dixon line produced rapid urbanization and industrialization, contributing to the rise of education and income levels and an upheaval to the system of racial segregation.40

If the 1970s delivered films and television series that presented southern white working-class men as charming rebels, it also solidified the image of a degenerate « race » of underclass southern whites, marking the rise of the redneck nightmare movie.

Nevertheless, as Bruce J. Schulman has argued, the process that transformed the US South from the Cotton Belt to the Sunbelt did not affect the whole section equally: the Sunbelt had its “shadows.” In the decades that produced this drastic change, the coexistence of extreme poverty and prosperity led commentators to criticize the moniker.41 Federal intervention, Schulman notes, “ignited growth at the top,” neglecting “the poverty smoldering at the bottom.” Southern politicians and elites used their influence and supported federal programs for industrial development and agricultural subsidies, while opposing welfare programs.42 Therefore, the Sunbelt did not shine equally to everyone. In the 1970s as the New South reconstructed the image of a region “too busy to hate,” uneducated, underclass whites represented an unredeemed link to the section’s troublesome past. As Christopher Dickey notes, Deliverance “played with the tension between the new South and the old South. The new South was Atlanta. The old South up in the mountains was a whole different world. You didn’t have to drive far to hit it.”43

Jimmy Carter’s inauguration seemed to affirm the acceptance of the New South into the national fold.44 In 1976, the year Carter took office, a captivating representation of the southern redneck conquered the nation when Burt Reynolds’s Bo “Bandit” Darville charmed audiences in Smokey and the Bandit and a number of subsequent “Good Ol’ Boy” movies. Yet, Reynolds’s charming outlaws were not the only images of working-class white southern masculinity to emerge in that decade. If the 1970s delivered films and television series that presented southern white working-class men as charming rebels, it also solidified the image of a degenerate “race” of underclass southern whites, marking the rise of the redneck nightmare movie. Unlike previous films that associated southern evilness with racism, redneck nightmare films generally ignored the social context in which these terrifying “natives” exist. There is no reason why they are the way they are, and their deviance appears to be something congenital or fostered by the evil environment they inhabit. Early prototypes of the subgenre include the adaptation of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931), The Story of Temple Drake (1933) and the exploitation cult classic Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964). The subgenre is solidified in the 1970s with films such as Easy Rider (1969), Deliverance (1972), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Macon County Line (1974), and Southern Comfort (1981).

Derek Nystrom argues that Hollywood’s white working-class southern men in the 1970s can only be understood in the context of the Sunbelt industrialization and urbanization. Nystrom analyzes the “move from redneck to the good ole boy” in representations of white working-class southern masculinity, placing Deliverance as a precursor to what he calls the “southern cycle” or as “an allegory of the Sunbelt’s rise.”45 Along with the transfer of economic and political power to the region, the rise of the Sunbelt also meant a shift from the unionized North to the antiunion South, a process that also contributed to the rise of the New Right. According to Nystrom, the role of class identity in the film’s “allegorical structure” must be considered in order to fully understand “the social history” of its production, identifying Deliverance as a key part of the period’s “larger cultural rearticulation of the South.” His analysis explains the “good ol’ boy” movies, but by placing Deliverance as an anomaly he obscures the film’s true legacy. Boorman’s film actually engendered a host of similar texts, affecting the way that poor southern whites are portrayed and represented.

Deliverance is a complex text, created by skillful artists, which complicates any easy reading of it as just a product of Sunbelt sociocultural angst. Although it has undoubtedly contributed to the stigmatization of underclass southern whites, it refuses to make the suburbanite protagonists the heroes of the story. The film’s opening sequence makes it very clear who attacks first. Lewis (Burt Reynolds) tells his companions that after the dam is built “there ain’t gon’ be no more river. There’s just gonna be a big, dead lake. . . . You just push a little more power into Atlanta, a little more air-conditioners for your smug little suburb, and you know what’s gonna happen? We’re gonna rape this whole god-damned landscape.46 We’re gonna rape it.” It can be argued, then, that the suburban Sunbelt is violating the wilderness and the “savage locals” are only retaliating. The plot also does not make it clear if the canoers’ actions are based on actual threat. Nevertheless, by producing the ultimate emasculating humiliation in the harrowing homosexual rape scene, the film essentially justifies any act of violence committed by its protagonists. When Christopher asked his father why was that scene in the story, James Dickey replied he “had to put the moral weight of murder on the suburbanites.”47

Although Deliverance refuses to have straightforward heroes and villains, the film’s publicity material clearly establishes with whom the audience should identify. Here is how the theatrical trailer introduces the characters: “These are the men, nothing very unusual about them. Suburban guys like you or your neighbor. Nothing very unusual about them until they decided to spend one weekend canoeing down the Cahulawassee River. . . . These are the men who decided not to play golf that weekend. Instead they sought the river.”48 Although the trailer proposes a more generically suburban identity for the protagonists, the film does not shy away from their “southerness.” A few years before the symbol had been reconfigured to symbolize carefree rebelliousness in good ol’ boy movies and television series, Lewis drives a car with a Confederate flag license plate. The trailer emphasizes the canoers’ middle-class suburban identity and contrasts them with the local rednecks, but it also makes it very clear that these are “men,” these are “guys.”

5Anxieties Over Masculinity

A few weeks after the film’s release, Life published an article about Jon Voight’s participation in Deliverance. The article has four images of the actor on the set. One larger, dominant image shows Voight climbing a cliff and describes the actor’s “nerve” to shoot the scene without a double. The smaller, central, picture shows him and Reynolds wrestling in the river and discusses their on-screen rivalry, noting how both men “pride themselves in being athletic.” The image on the lower right side shows “a dramatic white-water scene from the film.” The other small image, however, seems slightly out of place. It is a photo of Voight “relaxing with Marcheline Bertrand, the gentle, storybook pretty girl” he had recently married.49 Marcheline’s lovely, peaceful smile contrasts with the other images of intense male action. She is there to comfort her man. She presents no threat to his masculinity. And she is obviously not a part of the men’s sphere. If after some unforeseeable catastrophe that article were the only surviving artifact left of the 1970s, future investigators would have a hard time guessing that women were agitating for equality and against the patriarchy in the 1970s.50

Suburbanization and a pattern of domesticated consumer-oriented masculinity emerged by the 1950s, spawning the notion that US masculinity was in crisis. The social movements of the 1960s intensified that process, and by the 1970s a rhetoric proposing the emasculation of the white male was consolidated.51 The three cores of masculine identity‑breadwinning, soldiering, and heterosexuality‑were no longer guaranteed.52 Women started to gain prominence in the public sphere and to demand equal rights.53 As Steve Estes notes, the civil rights and Black Power movements defied the exclusion of African American males “from claiming their stake in American manhood.”54 The Gay Liberation movement defied heterosexual normalcy, counterculture challenged moral standards and family “values,” and the antiwar movement questioned the military service.55

These radical changes inspired the emergence of scientific, academic, and popular literature trying to deal with the perceived emasculation of American men. Magazines catering to this distressed male audience grew popular in the 1970s. A good example of this rhetoric in action is the advertisement for the revamped TRUE magazine: “One word describes the new TRUE magazine: MACHO. The honest-to-God American MAN deserves a magazine sans naked cuties, Dr. Spock philosophies, foppish, gutless ‘unisex’ pap, and platform shoes.” The ad advocates for the liberation the American male from the “sterile couches of pedantic psychiatrists” and from “the frivolous skirts of libbers.”56 In 1974 Ann Steinmann and David J. Fox published The Male Dilemma: How to Survive the Sexual Revolution. The book tries to find solutions for the crisis faced by American men in a rapidly changing society, in which for every gain made by women, “there is a corresponding loss of male power and prestige.”57 Sexual ambivalence, the authors argued, was affecting every aspect of men’s lives. Steinmann and Fox denounced the “highly mechanized, highly specialized society of the midcentury” in which males’ physical strength, individual expression, and moral codes are not appreciated, compromising their manhood.58 Furthermore, they contend, this world in which “the once clear-cut distinctions that separated men from women in their sexual and social roles have began to blur and break down” was not only detrimental to men. It caused constant marital conflict, venereal disease epidemics, “soaring” divorce and illegitimacy rates, and “the less identifiable atmosphere of object love, of sex for sex’s sake.”59

Deliverance is a crucial text to consider these issues, not only because of the onscreen story, but also because of how it was promoted, discussed, and criticized upon its release. Much of the film’s publicity revolved around the personalities of the men involved in its production. The set of Deliverance was a man’s world. According to Christopher Dickey, “It was like the whole film was becoming some kind of macho gamble in which each man had to prove he could take the risks the characters were running.”60 In promotional materials and interviews, cast members often complimented each other’s manly attributes: There are constant praises to Burt Reynolds’ physicality, Jon Voight’s courage and focus, and director John Boorman’s pushing them all to their limits. James Dickey’s persona also provided an important subtext for the film’s reception. Part suburbanite, part rugged outdoorsman, he was, according various commentators, a combination of the four protagonists’ qualities and defects. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution refers to him as “an almost mythical macho man in the Hemingway mold.”61 While describing the men involved in the picture, the documentary promo for the film’s release exudes testosterone. Dickey is as a man who “leaves his imprint on everything, and everybody he meets.” An accomplished college professor, he is “one of the major American poets of his generation” but also someone who has a “striking physical presence,” with the authority conferred by personal experience to write about “raging white water in a frail canoe, or hunting deer with a bow and arrow in the wilderness.” In the promo, Boorman compliments Reynolds’s “magnificent physique” and Dickey raves about the cast: “All I can say about these actors, Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, and Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox is that every one of them’s got more guts than a burglar.” Even the film’s production is portrayed as a battle of wills between two powerful dominant males: the director and the author/screenwriter. Boorman describes his relationship with Dickey as “turbulent,” but boasts that he maintained his ground: “I can say that I went fifteen rounds with a champ and I’m still on my feet.”62 There were even rumors that they actually engaged in a fistfight that left the director with a broken nose and minus four teeth.63 The intense level of competition and conflict resolution through homosocial bonding was an important subtext in both the film’s plot and publicity.

In the 1970s, Joan Mellen assessed gender in US cinema with two influential books: Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film (1974) and Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Cinema (1977). Her work shows how Deliverance was already considered an important text for understanding gender and sexuality shortly after its release. Mellen sees the disappearance of women from 1970s films as a punishment for their new demands and gains and as a reflection of “the belief that a relationship of equals would lead to male impotence.”64 Ultimately she reads the film through a logic of repressed homosexual desire, saying that rape scene was “exciting because it evoked an act they would willingly perform on each other were they not so repressed and alienated by the false accouterments of civilization.”65 Yet, the assumption that class and location affect men’s ability to express their sexual desires is latent in her analysis. Mellen mentions “cultures where male physical feeling does not impair masculine identity” without providing any concrete examples, but also describes the suburbanites’ attackers as “two rural degenerates, men primitive enough to act out those forbidden sexual impulses ‘civilized’ men like our heroes deflect into more acceptable manifestations such as hunting and contact sports.”66 Interestingly, she does not mention the regional identity of the characters, talking about them in terms of archetypes of American masculinity or in psychoanalytical terms by interpreting the story as a reflection of repressed desires projected into the “ghoulish hillbillies” (or the men’s “id”), concluding that the film is a “Freudian fable of the dangers of our instinctual life.” Robert Armour provides a similar reading in “Deliverance: Four Variations of the American Adam” (1973), noting that violence of nature and raw sexual instincts are familiar to the “hillbillies,” for whom “sexual acts satisfy natural urges, whether they are committed with a man, woman, cousin, or pig.”67 The film worked so well because for contemporary readers and critics, the role of the “exotic southern Other” was confined to the rural, underclass whites, which meant they could identify with the Atlanta suburbanites.

Stephen Farber’s reading of Deliverance’s depiction of masculinity contrasts sharply with Mellen’s. The New York Times critic sees it as “a devastating critique of machismo.” He compares Deliverance to Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), noting that “the heroes of both movies are decent, rather fastidious men forced to confront the violent nature in themselves.” Yet, he argues that whereas Peckinpah “clings to the code of the Old West, implying that in a savage world a baptism of blood is the first step to becoming a man,” Boorman makes “a sardonic comment against the sportsman mystique.” Farber concludes that Deliverance “is a major work, important for the artistic vision it brings to the urgent question of understanding and redefining masculinity.”68 Although Farber and Mellen have different opinions about the movie and come to different conclusions about its representation of masculinity, they both reveal how the film resonated with 1970s audiences and critics trying to deal with a “masculinity crisis.”

6The Legacy

Trying to establish a film’s popularity through box office figures and reviews alone can be tricky. It is possible to establish if it was widely seen or favorably reviewed, but that does not necessarily tell us who related to the film or how. What makes Deliverance such a relevant text is that it helped establish a subgenre (and a few tropes) in US cinema; it had a lasting impact on the people, the region, and even objects related to it; and it still serves as shorthand for poor white, and especially southern, scary backwardness and degeneracy.

“The book appeared in the stores in the summer of 1970 and quickly became a bestseller. The next summer, it was made into a movie with Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds. And after that, nothing good was the same,” said Christopher Dickey (son of Deliverance author James Dickey).

Deliverance premiered on August 11, 1972, at the Atlanta International Film Festival. At 2:00 p.m. the following day a “Deliverance Seminar” was held.69 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s review was not exactly raving. Howell Raines called it a “peacock of a movie‑beautiful and proud, but rendered faintly ridiculous by an inflated sense of its own importance.” Raines praised the film’s action and photography, but was less impressed by its philosophical pretention. Nevertheless, he calls it the “most anxiously awaited film here since Gone with the Wind,” noting that more than 1,750 tickets were sold for its first local showing.70 Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter, along with the Atlanta’s vice mayor, Maynard Jackson, attended the screening. Also in attendance were James Dickey, Burt Reynolds (who came in a Playboy private airplane), and Hollywood director Otto Preminger. Reynolds was made honorary citizen of Atlanta at the event.71Deliverance received the festival’s top award, the Golden Phoenix Best of the Festival prize. It also grabbed Best Director, Best Actor (Jon Voight), Best Supporting Actor (Ned Beatty), and Best Editor (Tom Priest).72 It then set in motion four decades of film production in Georgia. For the fiscal year of 2011 alone, the impact of that industry for the state’s economy was $2.4 billion.73 The movie made Burt Reynolds a bankable star, rescued Jon Voight’s career, and introduced two great theater performers to the movie screen: Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox.

Despite all that success, according to Christopher Dickey, “the book appeared in the stores in the summer of 1970 and quickly became a bestseller. The next summer, it was made into a movie with Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds. And after that, nothing good was the same.”74Deliverance has left an ambiguous legacy to the region it made infamous. Environmental historian Timothy Silver notes that the film’s success “spawned a boom in tourism that inevitably led to overdevelopment, pollution, and a host of other environmental problems within the Chattooga watershed.”75 Only 7,600 people had floated down the Chattooga River in 1972. That number almost tripled the following year and reached an astounding 67,784 in 1989.76 The death of twenty-two rafters following the film’s release made the US Forest Services heighten safety restrictions in the area, but rafting has become the cornerstone of the region’s tourism industry.

Doug Woodward, a technical advisor on the set, who later founded Southeastern Expedition, notes that there was some strife in the relationship between cast and crew and the locals. He recalls that when the film’s producers returned to a previously selected location, the owner of the property told them, “I just read the book and you’re not shooting that filthy story on my place!”77 The Rabun County Board of Commissioners, Stan Darnell, had mixed feelings about the film. Referring to the infamous rape scene he remarks: “Everybody up here was kind of up in arms. They didn’t expect that one scene to be in there. But we got the rafting industry, and quite a few other movies came here and helped real estate, and other businesses around.”78 An Atlanta Journal-Constitution piece celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the novel explored this ambiguous legacy, noting that the movie had a positive effect on the region’s economy, boosting its tourism and putting it on the map for future film productions, while stigmatizing the local population. George Reynolds, a folklorist and music teacher who worked in the area, contends that the film affected the way that the people of the region perceived themselves, and how they “perceived the way the world sees them.”79

According to The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, “Deliverance has powerfully shaped national perceptions of Appalachia, the South, and indeed all people and places perceived as ‘backwoods.’”80 It has done so, in no small part, by ushering in a host of similar films inaugurating a new subgenre in Hollywood and independent US cinema.81 Although the redneck nightmare subgenre has antecedents that go as far back as the 1930s, it can be argued that Deliverance established its “semantic and syntactic” elements.82 It has been spoofed, parodied, and referenced in countless movies, TV shows, and cartoons since its release.

Furthermore, references to the film still serve as shorthand for poor white (especially southern) backwardness and degeneracy. On September 18, 2013, The Daily Show presented a sketch about a land dispute on the Georgia-Tennessee border. The clichéd piece interviewed “ignorant hillbillies” and ridiculed them for a quick laugh. When “reporter” Al Madrigal makes a silly Honey Boo Boo joke, one of the interviewees, Dade County, Georgia, executive chairman Ted Rumley tells him the issue is not “something to joke about.” The segment then cuts to five seconds of Deliverance footage with the voice over: “And we all know what happens to funny city people in rural Georgia.” No context is given. No introduction is made. Five seconds of the movie are enough to provide the joke’s punch line.83

One of the most interesting anecdotes about the film’s international appeal comes from anthropologist Jim Birckhead, who studies popular media and minority group identity, focusing on both Appalachia and Aboriginal Australia. Birckhead watched a play in the Australian Outback that had a vignette about southern snake handling, performed by the Wagga Wagga theater company. When the cast and crew realized that he was a “specialist” on the topic, they asked him if snake handlers are “inbred like Deliverance.” After inquiring where the play’s director and cast got information to build their characters, he finds out that they did not find actual literature on Holiness people, but rather relied on media representation of mountain people, especially Deliverance, which “conjured up for them lurid images of bizarre, grotesque, inbred ‘hillbillies.’”84

Deliverance seems to be a curse and a blessing to everyone and everything involved with it. It brought money and tourism to the region, but it also caused ecological problems and the death of several people who tried to emulate the film’s stars. It brought James Dickey fame and fortune but, according to his son, it also caused great personal and emotional damage to him and his family. It simultaneously popularized and stigmatized banjo music.85 And it helped create a fascination with (and prejudices against) poor, rural southern whites. Maybe that is quite fitting for a story that seemed to condemn while being inescapably part of a complicated moment in American history. President Jimmy Carter, who was the governor of the state made infamous by the feature summarized it well: “It’s pretty rough. But it’s good for Georgia . . . I hope.”86

A short documentary film on Deliverance from 1972, which includes footage of James Dickey and John Boorman discussing the film.Directed by Ronald Saland, written by Jay Anson, photographed by Marcel Brockman and Morris Cruodo, and edited by Welater Hess. A Professional Films/Robbins Nest Production

Isabel Machado is a Brazilian historian currently living in Monterrey, Mexico, while writing her PhD dissertation for the University of Memphis. Her two master’s‑in history (University of South Alabama) and film studies (University of Iowa)‑provided her the interdisciplinary lens through which she approaches cultural history. Her current research uses Mardi Gras as a vehicle for understanding social and cultural changes in Mobile, Alabama, in the second half of the twentieth century. On her breaks from academic work she directed documentaries that also explored her fascination with, and affection for, the US South, where she lived for most of the thirteen years she spent in the United States. Her film Rootsy Hip: Hip-Hop Alabama Folk (2009) is a portrait of struggling musicians in Mobile, Alabama, and a meditation on what it means to be a white young man who makes quintessentially African American music in the South. Grand Fugue on the Art of Gumbo (2011) uses Eugene Walter’s radio broadcasts as narration and takes a peek at the ingredients that compose the Gulf Coast and its signature cuisine.

Notes

A Portuguese version of this article will be published simultaneously by the academic journal O Olha da Historia (Brazil).

“50 Top‑Grossing Films [Week ending August 9].” Variety, August 16, 1972, 11. It should be noted that even though Deliverance was released five days earlier, while Super Fly opened in two theaters, Deliverance was screened in only one that first week. “‘Fat City’ Fat Start 31G; ‘Deliverance’ Delivers Big First Days in NY; Nixon Spoof, Self‑Sold, Watched,” Variety, August 2, 1972, 8.

“Deliverance,” Variety, July 19, 1972, 14.

Stephen Farber, “Deliverance‑How It Delivers,” New York Times, August 20, 1972.

“Redneck nightmare” films are those in which a person, or a group of people, travel to or through the US South and have dreadful things done to them by monstrous “natives.” For more on the definition and contextualization of the redneck nightmare subgenre/cycle see: Isabel Machado dos Santos Wildberger, “The Redneck Nightmare Film Genre: How and Why the South of Moonshine and Inbred Maniacs Replaced the South of Moonlight and Magnolias in Popular Imagination” (MA Thesis, University of South Alabama, 2013).

For studies that follow the former approach, see Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), Karen L. Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), and articles in Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn McKee eds., American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). For examples of the latter, see Edward Campbell Jr., The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), Warren French, ed., The South and Film (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), Jack Temple Kirby, Media‑Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), Larry Langman and David Ebner, eds., Hollywood’s Image of the South: A Century of Southern Films (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001).

Peter Applebome has contended that the country, and Hollywood in particular, “has Ping‑Ponged between views of the South as a hellhole of poverty, torment, and depravity and as an American Eden of tradition, strength, and grace.” This is an interesting analogy, but only if we disregard the fact that negative and positive images of the section tend to historically coexist rather that alternate. Tara McPherson might be closer to the mark when she notes that there seems to be a recurring “cultural schizophrenia about the South” in popular culture. See Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 11; Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 3.

David L Smiley, “The Quest for the Central Theme in Southern History,” in The New South, volume 2 of Major Problems in the History of the American South: Documents and Essays, ed. Paul D. Escott et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 18.

See Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

Jack Temple Kirby, The Countercultural South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 56.

This song is from the re‑edited version of the film Bayou, directed by Harold Daniels (1957). In 1961 the movie was revamped with more nudity and violence along with a prologue featuring a banjo player singing this tune. This new version was re‑baptized Poor White Trash. See https://youtu.be/H2ZFPW5Cm6s.

Hunley contends that unlike the noble Cavaliers, the “thrifty Middle classes,” or “useful Yeomanry,” the poor white trash were descended from the “paupers and convicts whom Great Britain sent over to her faithful Virginia,” and of “indentured servants who were transported in great numbers from the mother country, or who followed their masters, the Cavaliers and Huguenots.” See Hundley, 264–65.

Mongrel Virginians denunciation of the “degenerative” nature of interracial families helped justify stricter antimiscegenation marriage legislation, such as the Virginia Racial Integrity Act (1924), throughout the South. Interracial marriage had already been outlawed in Virginia since 1691, but what the new act added was a definition of whiteness. For more on this subject, see Gregory Michael Dorr, “Racial Integrity Laws of the 1920s,” in Encyclopedia Virginia, ed. Brendan Wolfe (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 2011), http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/Racial_Integrity_Laws_of_the_1920s.

Tugwell was the director of the Resettlement Administration at the Information Division of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and Striker was chief of the Historical Section of the Information Division of the Resettlement Administration. See Richard D. MacCann, The People’s Films: A Political History of US Government Motion Pictures (New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1973), 60.

It includes works such as Edith Summers Kelly’s Weeds (1923) and Henry Kroll’s The Cabin in the Cotton (1931). See Jack Temple Kirby, The Countercultural South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).

O’Connor’s work only had one major feature adaptation, John Huston’s Wise Blood (1979), but there were several adaptations of Faulkner’s fiction. The work of Erskine Caldwell has arguably generated some of the greatest sources of poor white southerner stereotypes. Two contemporary adaptations of well-known novels, directed by the same acclaimed Hollywood director, provide a good example of the impact of the southern gothic tradition of the portrayal of underclass southern whites. The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Tobacco Road (1941) were both directed by John Ford, but the representations of the Joads and the Lesters could not be more contrasting; while the Okie family is dignified, the Georgia sharecroppers are a collection of hillbilly stereotypes.

“Deliverance,” Variety, July 19, 1972, 14.

J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 195.

See Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton South to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 19381980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Randall M. Miller and George E. Pozzetta, Shades of the Sunbelt: Essays on Ethnicity, Race, and the Urban South (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988).

Schulman, From Cotton South to Sunbelt, 180.

Christopher Dickey, Summer of Deliverance, 170.

Jack Temple Kirby relates Carter’s political success to “the redemption of the white masses from pity and from racism.” See Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination, 170.

This association of the landscape with a violated body mirrors a previous scene in the screenplay (which did not make it to the final film), where Lewis calls Atlanta “that old whore.” See Deliverance, Boorman, and James Dickey, Deliverance, Screenplay Second Draft.

As an interesting side note: The same issue has an article about chess champion Bobby Fischer with the subhead, “The news from Reyjavik is that the Big Bad Wolf of chess has turned into Little Red Riding Hood.” See Brad Darrach, “Can This Be Bobby Fischer?,” Life, August 15, 1972, 42.

K. Michael Prince, “Neoconfederates in the Basement: The League of the South and the Crusade against Southern Emasculation,” in White Masculinity in the Recent South, ed. Trent Watts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 235.

Robert O. Self shows how the shift from “breadwinner liberalism” to “breadwinner conservatism,” a reaction to the gains made by nonwhites, women, and gay men and lesbians, would lead to a discourse of the defense of family values that would fuel the rise of the New Right and Religious Right. See Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012).

Steve Estes shows that the relationship between white southern masculinity and sexual control was manifested in their violence against black men, which usually had sexual undertones, and that challenges to segregation also fueled male anxieties. See Steve Estes, “A Question of Honor: Masculinity and Massive Resistance to Integration” in White Masculinity in the Recent South, ed. Trent Watts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 111.

It was also nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Film Editor in the 45th Annual Academy Awards (1973). Sam Lucchese, “Deliverance is Mostest of Bestest at Atlanta; Sounder and Tyson, Too,” Variety, August 23, 1972, 7. Scott Cain, “Deliverance Wins Top festival Prize,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 20, 1972.

Emily Satterwhite, “Deliverance,” in Media, vol. 18 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 233.

See Wildberger, “The Redneck Nightmare Genre.”

For film scholar Rick Altman, the analysis of a film genre is only complete once we consider both its semantic (iconic codes) and syntactic (narrative construction) elements. See Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London, BFI, 1999).

Jim Birkhead, “On Snakes and People,” in Images of the South: Constructing a Regional Culture on Film and Video, ed. Karl G. Heider (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 1993.

Timothy Silver noted that on a visit to favorite breakfast stop in the Appalachian Mountains he spotted T-shirts for sale that read, “Paddle faster. I think I hear banjo music.” Different versions of the T-shirt can also be easily found online. See Silver, “The Deliverance Factor.”

Tess Vigeland: When big movies are filmed in small towns, they can pour money into the local economy. Crews need to be fed, housed, moved about and entertained. Productions need extras, and every once in awhile a local gets cast in a speaking part. Some movies even leave a footprint long after the cameras are gone. Santa Barbara Wine Country saw a huge influx of tourists after « Sideways. »

But not every production leaves a sweet taste in locals’ mouths. Film producer Cory Welles and director Kevin Walker decided to make a documentary about one such movie, and the people it portrayed. Cory filed this story about her own film, « The Deliverance of Rabun County. »

Cory Welles: The folks in Rabun County, Ga., put on the Chattooga River Festival this past June to encourage people to visit and take care of their river. But it wasn’t the moonshine tastin’ or banjo pickin’ that got me out to this lush, green mountainous part of the state. It was “Deliverance.”

The movie was shot on and around the Chattooga 40 years ago this year, and they were using that as the hook for the festival. What Sarah Gillespie and others who helped put the event together didn’t count on was how it would split the community.

Sarah Gillespie: We had a commissioners meeting, and someone stood up and was very emotional — very real feelings — and said that the movie had ruined her life.

I heard stories of people being passed up for jobs because they came from Rabun County. And those negative images have been reinforced by 40 years of “Deliverance” jokes.

But not everyone around has bad feelings about “Deliverance.” And that includes Billy Redden, the backwoods-looking boy who played Dueling Banjos with Ronny Cox in the film. Billy’s 55 years old now, and he says “Deliverance” was the best thing that ever happened to him. But that doesn’t mean he saw much money from it.

Billy Redden: I’d like to have all the money I thought I’d make from this movie. I wouldn’t be working at Walmart right now. And I’m struggling really hard to make ends meet.

Billy didn’t make alot from “Deliverance,” but Rabun County did. Before the movie came out, the number of people who visited the Chattooga was in the hundreds. Afterwards, it was in the tens of thousands. Rafting is now a $20 million industry here and tourism is the area’s number one source of revenue. So you can understand why the organizers of the Chattooga River Festival decided to highlight the film.

But you can also understand the objections.

Tammy Whitmire: A lot of people tried to talk me into supporting this and so they justified it and said, « Tammy, but it’s making money, it’s tourism, it’s bringing people to the county, why does it matter how they get here? »

Tammy Whitmire is a county official who’s lived in the area since she was nine and married a man whose family has been here for 15 generations. But she refused to support the Chatooga River Festival because of “Deliverance.”

Whitmire: As long as they get here and spend their money, and my thought to that particularly is, you know you’re gonna sell what are you selling, to get those few dollars? Is it worth a few dollars? For people around the world to think that’s what we are here? No. Or for me, it is not worth it.

But it’s more than just a few dollars. Then-governor Jimmy Carter established a film commission in Georgia after “Deliverance” came out. And since then, the state’s become one of the top five production destinations in the U.S. And it’s not just movie money that’s been drawn to this part of the state, it’s people with money. These days, million-dollar vacation homes line the shores of the area’s lakes.

You can understand why city-folk might want to have a place in these parts. The Chattooga is beautiful — unbelievably beautiful. On a raft ride down the river, our guide pointed to a tree-lined bank and said “That’s where the rape scene was filmed!” And 40 years after “Deliverance” hit theaters, that’s still the issue: Can this gorgeous river and the disturbing scenes that were filmed here ever be separated? Do they need to be?

Sarah Gillespie: “Deliverance” is a significant part of our history, good or bad. It’s a significant part of the river’s history. It was filmed here. Stereotypes are stereotypes — they’re in every single movie that you’ll see in your life.

For what it’s worth, my partner Kevin and I found the stereotypes to be anything but true. We met so many great people in Rabun County — especially Billy Redden, the “banjo boy.”

Redden: We’re not a bad people up here, we’re a loving people. Rabun County is a pretty good town. It’s peaceful, not a lot of crime going on, just a real peaceful town. Everybody pretty much gets along with everybody.

Deliverance (1972) is British director John Boorman’s gripping, absorbing action-adventure film about four suburban Atlanta businessmen friends who encounter disaster in a summer weekend’s river-canoeing trip. It was one of the first films with the theme of city-dwellers against the powerful forces of nature.

The exciting box-office hit, most remembered for its inspired banjo duel and the brutal, violent action (and sodomy scene), was based on James Dickey’s adaptation of his own 1970 best-selling novel (his first) of the same name – he contributed the screenplay and acted in a minor part as the town sheriff.

The stark, uncompromising film was nominated for three Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Film Editing), but went away Oscar-less. The beautifully-photographed film, shot entirely on location (in northern Georgia’s Rabun County that is bisected by the Chattooga River), was the least-nominated film among the other Best Picture nominees. Ex-stuntman Burt Reynolds took the role of bow-and-arrow expert Lewis after it was turned down by James Stewart, Marlon Brando, and Henry Fonda on account of its on-location hazards.

The increasingly claustrophobic, downbeat film, shot in linear sequence along forty miles of a treacherous river, has been looked upon as a philosophical or mythical allegory of man’s psychological and grueling physical journey against adversity. It came during the 70s decade when many other conspiracy or corruption-related films were made with misgivings, paranoia or questioning of various societal institutions or subject areas, such as the media (i.e., Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976)), politics (i.e., The Parallax View (1974), All the President’s Men (1976)), science (i.e., Capricorn One (1977), Coma (1978), The China Syndrome (1979)), and various parts of the US itself (i.e., Race with the Devil (1975), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and later Southern Comfort (1981)).

A group of urban dwellers test their manhood and courage, totally vulnerable in the alien wild, and pit themselves against the hostile violence of nature. At times, however, they are attracted to nature, and exhilarated and joyful about their experiences in the wild. (Director Boorman pursued the same complex eco-message theme of man vs. nature in other films, including Zardoz (1973) and The Emerald Forest (1985).) As they progress further and further along in uncharted territory down the rapids, the men ‘rape’ the untouched, virginal wilderness as they are themselves violated by the pristine wilderness and its degenerate, inbred backwoods inhabitants. Survivalist skills come to the forefront when civilized standards of decency and logic fail.

The film’s taglines were tantalizing:

« This is the weekend they didn’t play golf. »

« Where does the camping trip end…and the nightmare begin…? »

« What did happen on the Cahulawassee River?

The river is the potent personification of the complex, natural forces that propel men further and further along their paths. It tests their personal values, exhibiting the conflict between country and city, and accentuates what has been hidden or unrealized in civilized society. The adventurers vainly seek to be ‘delivered’ from the evil in their own hearts, and as in typical horror films, confront other-worldly forces in the deep woods. The flooding of the region after the completion of a dam construction project alludes to the purification and cleansing of the sins of the world by the Great Flood. The film was also interpreted as an allegory of the US’ involvement in the Vietnam War – as the men (the US military) intruded into a foreign world (Southeast Asia), and found it was raped or confronted by wild forces it couldn’t understand or control.

The Story

The film opens with voice-overs of the main characters discussing the « vanishing wilderness » and the corruption of modern civilization, while the credits play over views of the flooding of one of the last untamed stretches of land, and the imminent wiping out of the entire Cahulawassee River and the small town of Aintry.

[The film’s trailer provides details about the foursome: « These are the men. Nothing very unusual about them. Suburban guys like you or your neighbor. Nothing very unusual about them until they decided to spend one weekend canoeing down the Cahulawassee River. Ed Gentry – he runs an art service, his wife Martha has a boy Dean. Lewis Medlock has real estate interests, talks about resettling in New Zealand or Uruguay. Drew Ballinger – he’s sales supervisor for a soft drink company. Bobby Trippe – bachelor, insurance and mutual funds. These are the men who decided not to play golf that weekend. Instead, they sought the river. »]

Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty in his film debut), an overweight insurance salesman

Drew Ballinger (Ronny Cox in his film debut), a guitar player and sales supervisor

Ed Gentry (Jon Voight, a star actor due to his appearance in Midnight Cowboy (1969)), married, runs an art service

Lewis lectures his friends and anxiously bemoans the dam construction that will soon destroy the (‘damned’ or ‘dammed’) Cahulawassee River and town. He urges his friends to take a ride down the river before a man-made lake will forever flood it:

…because they’re buildin’ a dam across the Cahulawassee River. They’re gonna flood a whole valley, Bobby, that’s why. Dammit, they’re drownin’ the river…Just about the last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unf–ked up river in the South. Don’t you understand what I’m sayin’?…They’re gonna stop the river up. There ain’t gonna be no more river. There’s just gonna be a big, dead lake…You just push a little more power into Atlanta, a little more air-conditioners for your smug little suburb, and you know what’s gonna happen? We’re gonna rape this whole god-damned landscape. We’re gonna rape it.

His friends Bobby, Ed, and Drew label Lewis’ views as « extremist. » In voice-over, Lewis coaxes his three, soft city-slicker friends to join him for a weekend canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River – to pit themselves against the US wilderness. (The film’s major poster declared: « This is the weekend they didn’t play golf. ») They leave behind their business jobs and civilized values for their « last chance » to go back to unspoiled nature for a weekend of canoeing, hunting, and fishing, in northern Georgia’s scenic Appalachian wilderness.

Their two cars, Lewis’ International Scout 4 x 4 and Drew’s station wagon with canoes strapped on top, drive into the hillbilly wilderness to their odyssey’s starting point:

We’re gonna leave Friday, from Atlanta. I’m gonna have you back in your little suburban house in time to see the football game on Sunday afternoon. I know you’ll be back in time to see the pom-pom girls at halftime ’cause I know that’s all you care about…Yeah, there’s some people up there that ain’t never seen a town before, no bigger than Aintry anyway. And then those woods are real deep. The river’s inaccessible except at a couple of points…This is the last chance we got to see this river. You just wait till you feel that white-water under you, Bobby…I’ll have you in the water in an hour.

The first view of the city-dwelling buddies in the film occurs when the vehicles pull into a junk-littered, backwoods area that appears « evacuated already. » The men reveal more of their believable personalities by their reactions to the community of mountain folk they meet in this first scene:

the virile, dark-haired, dare-devil, savvy, somewhat repulsive leader Lewis (a patch on his jacket identifies him as the Co-captain of a skydiving group

From behind a dilapidated, squalid shanty building, the first primitive hillbilly emerges, suspicious that they are from the power company. Lewis asks the old mountain man (Ed Ramey) about hiring him to drive their two cars to a point downstream at their landing point of Aintry:

Lewis: We want somebody to drive ’em down to Aintry for us.
Man: Hell, you’re crazy.
Lewis: No s–t. Hey, fill that one up with gas, huh, OK?

He is told: « You don’t know nuthin’. » Possible drivers are suggested to Lewis for hire: « You might get the Griner Brothers…They live back over that way. »

One of the film’s highlights is a lively, captivating banjo duel of bluegrass music, « Dueling Banjos » (actual title « Feudin’ Banjos » – arranged and played by Eric Weissberg with guitarist Steve Mandell). [The song was authored by Arthur « Guitar Boogie » Smith in the 50s, and copyrighted by the Combine Music Corp.] Drew begins by playing chords on his guitar. A deformed, retarded, albino hillbilly youngster (Billy Redden) (on banjo) appears on the porch and answers him. Under his breath, Bobby criticizes the cretinous hillbilly boy: « Talk about genetic deficiencies. Isn’t that pitiful? » From behind him, one of the backwoods folks asks: « Who’s pickin’ a banjo here? » The impromptu song is played as a rousing challenge between the two. Toward its furious ending, Drew admits to the grinning boy: « I’m lost. » When Drew, seen as a suspicious stranger, compliments the moon-faced winner when they are done – « God damn, you play a mean banjo, » the mute, inbred, half-witted boy resumes his stony stare, turns his head sharply, and refuses to shake hands with the interloping foreigner. Drew is obviously disappointed that the boy ignores him.

As Lewis drives to the nearby Griner Bros. garage, he ridicules Bobby’s means of making a living – insurance sales, thereby tempting fate: « I’ve never been insured in my life. I don’t believe in insurance. There’s no risk. » In an edgy, volatile encounter, Lewis bargains firmly with one of the grimy, poverty-stricken Griner brothers (Seamon Glass and Randall Deal) to have them drive their vehicles to Aintry for $40 – and receives a second ominous warning about the hazardous river:

Griner: Canoe trip?
Lewis: That’s right, a canoe trip.
Griner: What the hell you wanna go f–k around with that river for?
Lewis: Because it’s there.
Griner: It’s there all right. You get in there and can’t get out, you’re gonna wish it wasn’t.

Ed fears that they have pushed too hard: « Listen, Lewis, let’s go back to town and play golf…Lewis, don’t play games with these people. » With Ed as his passenger, Lewis races his Bronco against the Griner’s pickup truck to the river’s launch point a few miles away through the dense woods – in his station wagon, Drew follows at a safe distance behind with Bobby. The reflections of leaves from the colorful canopy above shrouds and obscures a clear view of Ed and Lewis through the windshield – the jostling ride frightens Ed: « Lewis, you son-of-a-bitch, why do we have to go so god-damned fast?…Lewis, you’re gonna kill us both, you son-of-a-bitch, before we ever see any water. » When they reach the peaceful water’s edge, Lewis philosophically contemplates the view:

Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything…A couple more months, she’ll all be gone…from Aintry on up. One big dead lake.

They finally venture onto the river in two canoes: Drew with Ed, and Bobby with Lewis. Through the trees, they are observed at the water’s edge by the Griners – inhabitants of the area before ‘civilization’ took over. The neophyte canoers are unsure of their direction:

Bobby: Which way are we goin’, this way or that?
Lewis: I think, uh, downstream would be a good idea, don’t you? Drew – you and Bobby see some rocks, you yell out now, right?…
Bobby: Lewis, is this the way you get your rocks off?

At first, their encounter with the river and nature is peaceful and tranquil as they paddle along – on a sunny day. Above them on a cross-walk bridge high above the placid river, the banjo-playing lad silently but intently watches them – the camera shooting from Drew’s perspective. Before the first of many, increasingly-exciting sequences on the water, Lewis stands upright in the canoe and announces: « This gonna be fun! » They confront the twisting and turning white-water rapids of the swift-moving Chattooga River. They are exuberant and euphoric after victoriously navigating the challenging but not overwhelming wild-flowing water – under Lewis’ expert instruction. Bobby is thrilled about shooting the rapids:

That’s the best – the second best sensation I ever felt.

But Ed isn’t as certain: « Damn, I thought we bought the farm there, for a while. » Lewis reminisces about how it must have been for the original pioneers, while Bobby foolishes thinks they’ve masterfully beaten the river:

Lewis: The first explorers saw this country, saw it just like us.
Drew: I can imagine how they felt.
Bobby: Yeah, we beat it, didn’t we? Did we beat that?
Lewis: You don’t beat it. You don’t beat this river.

With a high-powered bow-and-arrow fishing rod, Lewis takes aim at a fish, misses and then warns:

Machines are gonna fail and the system’s gonna fail…then, survival. Who has the ability to survive? That’s the game – survive.

Lewis remarks that the mild-mannered, secure-in-life Ed has all the comforts of civilization, but does he know how to survive in the wild like a man? His implication to his companion is that only the strong survive:

Ed: Well, the system’s done all right by me.
Lewis: Oh yeah. You gotta nice job, you gotta a nice house, a nice wife, a nice kid.
Ed: You make that sound rather s–tty, Lewis.
Lewis: Why do you go on these trips with me, Ed?
Ed: I like my life, Lewis.
Lewis: Yeah, but why do you go on these trips with me?
Ed: You know, sometimes I wonder about that.

The comrades camp at night by the river’s edge, setting up tents, sitting around a campfire, listening to Drew’s guitar playing, drinking beer, and roasting a fish that Lewis has speared. Bobby expresses some appreciation for the virgin river and the wilderness surrounding it:

Bobby: It’s true, Lewis, what you said. There’s somethin’ in the woods and in the water that we have lost in the city.
Lewis: We didn’t lose it. We sold it.
Bobby: Well, I’ll say one thing for the system – the system did produce the air-mattress. Or as it’s better known among we camping types the instant broad. And if you fellows will excuse me, I’m gonna go be mean to my air mattress.

Tension is heightened when Lewis senses « something or someone » in the blackness of the night around them. The three tenderfoots criticize Lewis’ affinity to nature as he disappears to investigate: « He wants to be one with nature and he can’t hack it. » Ed drunkenly philosophizes about their isolation from the world:

No matter what disasters may occur in other parts of the world, or what petty little problems arise…, no one can find us up here.

The next morning after rising early, Ed takes his bow and arrow and stalks a deer – emulating his buddy. But his hands tremble at the moment of the arrow’s release toward a live animal, and the shot veers into a tree trunk. Drew sensitively comments: « I don’t understand how anyone could shoot an animal. » Ed later explains his reason for faltering: « I lost control psychologically. » No longer intoxicated by the thrill of the outdoors, Bobby complains about his mosquito bites: « I got eaten alive last night. My bites have got bites…I’m a salesman, Ed. » Further down the river, Ed and Bobby become separated from the other two behind them. They pull their canoe out of the river when they decide to rest in the thick wilderness next to it.

More threatening than the untamed river are two evil, violent, primitive, degenerate and hostile mountain men, a gay hillbilly (Bill McKinney) and a grizzly, toothless man (Herbert « Cowboy » Coward) armed with a 12 gauge double-barreled shotgun who suddenly appear from the woods and confront the intruders. [The wilderness isn’t populated with romantic survivalists or enobled, heroic characters as in adventure stories, but sadistic brutes.] The two inexperienced, naive adventurers, assuming that the menacing backwoodsmen (who are harrassing them) are hiding a still to manufacture bootleg whiskey, promise not to tell anyone where it is located. Even away from his urban citified element, Ed maintains an inappropriate decorum of decency and ineffectually calls the animalistic rednecks ‘gentlemen’:

Mountain Man: What the hell you think you’re doin’?
Ed: Headin’ down river. A little canoe trip, headin’ for Aintry.
Mountain Man: Aintry?
Bobby: Sure, this river only runs one way, captain, haven’t you heard?
Mountain Man: You ain’t never gonna get down to Ain-.
Ed: Well, why not?
Mountain Man: ‘Cause. This river don’t go to Aintry. You done taken a wrong turn. See uh, this here river don’t go nowhere near Aintry.
Bobby: Where does it go, then?
Mountain Man: Boy, you are a lost one, ain’t ya?
Bobby: Well, hell, I guess this river comes out somewhere, don’t it? That’s where we’re goin’. Somewhere. Look, we don’t want any trouble here.
Ed: If you gentlemen have a still near here, hell, that’s fine with us.
Bobby: Why sure. We’d never tell anybody where it is. You know somethin’, you’re right, we’re lost. We don’t know where in the hell we are.
Toothless Man: A still?
Bobby: Right, yeah. You’re makin’ some whiskey up here. We’ll buy some from ya, we could use it, couldn’t we?
Mountain Man: Do you know what you’re talkin’ about?
Ed: We don’t know what we’re talkin’ about, honestly we don’t.
Mountain Man: No, no. You said somethin’ about makin’ whiskey, right? Isn’t that what you said?
Ed: We don’t know what you’re doin’ and we don’t care. That’s none of our business.
Mountain Man: That’s right. It’s none of your god-damned business, right.
Ed: We got quite a long journey ahead of us, gentlemen.
Toothless Man: Hold it. You ain’t goin’ no damn wheres.
Ed: This is ridiculous.
Toothless Man: Hold it, or I’ll blow your guts out all over these woods.
Ed: Gentlemen, we can talk this thing over. What is it you require of us?

At shotgun point, in a nightmarish and frightening sequence, the two sexually-perverted rustics viciously target them. They order them up into the woods where they tie Ed (with his own belt) to a tree. The mountain man sexually humiliates Bobby – the chubby-faced, defenseless intruder into his territory. He forces the fat salesman to first strip down to his underwear.

After a degrading roll around in the dirt and up a steep, leaf-strewn hillside while fondling and groping his prey, the mountain man/rapist makes Bobby squeal like a female sow before sodomizing him. Strapped against a tree, Ed helplessly watches in horror:

Lewis and Drew silently paddle up and come upon the scene of brutalization. Meanwhile, the Toothless Man (with a bare-gummed sneer on his face) prepares to order Ed to perform fellatio upon him at gunpoint: « He’s got a real purty mouth, ain’t he? » With his bow and arrow, Lewis shoots and kills the Mountain Man with one arrow that is shot through his back and protrudes from his chest. The Toothless Man drops his shotgun and scurries away into the woods, as the Mountain Man staggers around with the arrow through his body – and then falls dead.

Nervously and dramatically, the outsider-tourists argue about what to do next – should they report the killing to the authorities or submerge the evidence in the ground?

Lewis: What are we gonna do with him?
Drew: There’s not but one thing to do. Take the body down to Aintry. Turn it over to the Highway Patrol. Tell ’em what happened.
Lewis: Tell ’em what exactly?
Drew: Just what happened. This is justifiable homicide if anything is. They were sexually assaulting two members of our party at gunpoint. Like you said, there was nothin’ else we could do.
Ed: Is he alive?
Lewis: Not now. Well, let’s get our heads together. (To vengeful Bobby) Come on now, let’s not do anything foolish. Does anybody know anything about the law?
Drew: Look, I-I was on jury duty once. It wasn’t a murder trial.
Lewis: A murder trial? Well, I don’t know the technical word for it, Drew, but I know this. You take this man down out of the mountains and turn him over to the Sheriff, there’s gonna be a trial all right, a trial by jury.
Drew: So what?
Lewis: We killed a man, Drew. Shot him in the back – a mountain man, a cracker. It gives us somethin’ to consider.
Drew: All right, consider it, we’re listenin’.
Lewis: S–t, all these people are related. I’d be god-damned if I’m gonna come back up here and stand trial with this man’s aunt and his uncle, maybe his momma and his daddy sittin’ in the jury box. What do you think, Bobby? (Bobby rushes at the corpse, but is restrained) How about you, Ed?
Ed: I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Drew: Now you listen, Lewis. I don’t know what you got in mind, but if you try to conceal this body, you’re settin’ yourself up for a murder charge. Now that much law I do know! This ain’t one of your f–kin’ games. You killed somebody. There he is!
Lewis: I see him, Drew. That’s right, I killed somebody. But you’re wrong if you don’t see this as a game…Dammit, we can get out of this thing without any questions asked. We get connected up with that body and the law, this thing gonna be hangin’ over us the rest of our lives. We gotta get rid of that guy!…Anywhere, everywhere, nowhere.
Drew: How do you know that other guy hasn’t already gone for the police?
Lewis: And what in the hell is he gonna tell ’em, Drew, what he did to Bobby?
Drew: Now why couldn’t he go get some other mountain men? Now why isn’t he gonna do that? You look around you, Lewis. He could be out there anywhere, watchin’ us right now. We ain’t gonna be so god-damned hard to follow draggin’ a corpse.
Lewis: You let me worry about that, Drew. You let me take care of that. You know what’s gonna be here? Right here? A lake – as far as you can see hundreds of feet deep. Hundreds of feet deep. Did you ever look out over a lake, think about something buried underneath it? Buried underneath it. Man, that’s about as buried as you can get.
Drew: Well, I am tellin’ you, Lewis, I don’t want any part of it.
Lewis: Well, you are part of it!
Drew: IT IS A MATTER OF THE LAW!
Lewis: The law? Ha! The law?! What law?! Where’s the law, Drew? Huh? You believe in democracy, don’t ya?
Drew: Yes, I do.
Lewis: Well then, we’ll take a vote. I’ll stand by it and so will you.

Under stress, the normal demeanor of the urban professionals becomes more primal and crazed. Drew persuasively argues that they must take the body with them and lawfully report the incident as self-defense (a « justifiable homicide ») to the police. Drew is outvoted when the decent, pipe-smoking Ed casts the decisive vote in the ‘democratic’ process – a consequential vote that Drew calls « the most important decision of your whole life…We’re gonna have to live with this for the rest of our lives. » Lewis’ viewpoint eventually wins out with Ed’s collaboration – they decide to bury the man without reporting the incident (fearing the vengeful local residents wouldn’t accept their explanation and would be antagonistic toward them in a local trial). They expect that the waters of the future dam site would keep the corpse a secret and cover up their own awful crime. They add another dead creature to the soon-to-be dead wilderness.

To prepare for the burial, Lewis pulls the arrow out of the chest of Bobby’s attacker. The foursome awkwardly carry the body to a chosen gravesite. In a frenzy, they dig a grave with their bare hands, animalistically scratching and clawing with their hands. The gravediggers place the Mountain Man and the shotgun in the shallow grave, but the body’s stubborn, outstretched arm won’t willingly remain buried under the soft earth.

In haste, the panicked quartet anxiously race to their canoes to « paddle on down to Aintry to get the cars and go home. » As they descend and approach more frightening rapids downriver, Drew has neglected to put on his lifejacket. He rises, shakes his dazed head, loses his balance, topples and pitches (or falls) forward into the rough water in some noisy, churned-up rapids and disappears under the surface – he doesn’t resurface. Ed’s wooden canoe hits a large boulder, capsizes, and splinters into two pieces. The second canoe collides with it and also capsizes. All of the men are catapulted and spilled into a vicious set of cascading water and carried downstream in the frothy white foam. Lewis suffers an excruciatingly-painful right thighbone compound fracture when he strikes some underwater rocks – he cries out: « My leg’s broke. » With viscera (bone and flesh) hanging out of his pant’s leg where the wound was sustained, Lewis conjectures that « Drew was shot » by « that toothless bastard. » Clutching his leg and screaming in agony, Lewis finds refuge on some jagged rocks on the shoreline next to the river where high cliffs overlook them. Drew’s damaged guitar floats by in the water, as Ed vainly calls out for his companion – his voice echoes throughout the gorge’s canyons.

They paranoically suspect that they are the targets of gunshots, fired by the murdered man’s buddy poised high atop the towering cliff above them (« he’s right up there »). Ed surmises that they are retaliatory targets: « He’s gonna try and kill us, too. If he killed Drew, he’s gonna have to kill us. » The three are trapped in a gorge, feeling like sitting ducks [filmed at Tallulah Gorge]. Now they are compelled to play the deadly ‘game’ of survival. Ed yells at the group’s self-proclaimed leader who has suffered a debilitating fate:

Ed: What are we gonna do, Lewis? You’re the guy with the answers. What the hell do we do now?
Lewis: Now you get to play the game.
Ed: Lewis, you’re wrong.

Bobby is reduced to a fearful, whimpering weakling, and Lewis is so seriously injured that his leg must be splinted with a canoe paddle. Alone, Ed must provide active leadership and guide his friends to safety and civilization. He becomes changed forever by the struggle to survive in the malevolent, backwoods world. In a daring scene, he scales the face of the sheer rock cliff within the gorge in the darkness, with a bow and arrow on his back, to end the threat of a rifleman that he suspects shot Drew. Hanging precariously, he glances at his wallet’s picture of his wife and child – but they slip from his grasp. He fears: « God damn it, you’re never gonna get out of this gorge alive! »

Exhausted by the torturous climb, he falls asleep at the top, waking to the early morning light and a silhouetted glimpse of an unidentified mountaineer with a Winchester Model 1892 lever-action repeating rifle. He presumes the figure is the toothless man bent on revenge. Ed’s hands shake as he aims his bow and arrow. At the same instant the arrow releases, he slips on the rocks and painfully falls on his side onto one of his own arrows – it pierces his side. It first looks like he has missed his target. The hillbilly with the rifle staggers over to shoot his wounded attacker from point-blank range, but then falls dead from the arrow protruding through his neck.

Ed frantically searches inside the man’s mouth to identify him but remains uncertain whether he is the toothless man. He hurls both his bow and the man’s shotgun into the river far below, and then slowly lowers the corpse down the gorge’s cliff face at the end of a rope. When he uses the rope to rappel down the cliff, the line snaps and he is tossed into the river with the corpse. He is almost drowned under the surface when he becomes entangled with both the line and the clinging dead man. To hide any possible clues of the unknown killer, he later weights down the body with rocks and sinks it into the river.

The three finish their journey (with the seriously-wounded Lewis lying on the floor of the canoe). They locate Drew’s lifeless, drowned body along the way, lodged against a boulder and a fallen tree with his disfigured arm twisted behind his head. They scour his body for evidence of bullet wounds [whether he was shot or not remains uncertain], and then are also compelled to dispose of his weighted body at the bottom of the river:

Bobby: What are you going to do with Drew?
Ed: If a bullet made this, there are people who can tell.
Bobby: Oh God, there’s no end to it. I didn’t really know him.
Ed: Drew was a good husband to his wife Linda and you were a wonderful father to your boys, Drew – Jimmie and Billie Ray. And if we come through this, I promise to do all I can for ’em. He was the best of us.
Bobby: Amen.

In the final, jostling leg of the journey, the sides of their aluminum canoe scrape and crash against the rocks, causing severe pain for the incapacitated Lewis. At last, they return to civilization at Aintry, marked by junked cars at the river’s edge. Bobby is jubilant at the sight of rusted hulks of cars:

We made it. We made it, Ed. We made it. We’re back, Ed.

Tenaciously insistent that they all have the same story, Ed manufactures an explanatory alibi for their entire weekend:

Ed: Everything happened right here. Lewis broke his leg in those rapids there, and Drew drowned here.
Bobby: No, nothin’ happened here.
Ed: Bobby, listen to me. We got to stop them from lookin’ up river. It’s important that we get together on this thing. Do you understand?…We’re not out of this yet.

At Aintry, Ed is stunned to discover that the Griner brothers delivered their cars as they had arranged. After phoning for help, both Lewis and Ed are taken away in an ambulance for medical attention. Even the simplest signs of civilization (paper tissues and hot water) are appreciated by Ed who is obviously overwhelmed by his experience. In a local boarding house where they are placed by country lawmen, Bobby and Ed are served a home-cooked meal that includes corn, and a conversation about « the darndest-looking cucumber you ever seen. »

But they do not tell the local law officers what has really happened to them, and deny having any encounters with hillbillies. Bobby is worried that their story isn’t holding together: « We’re in trouble. They don’t believe us. » Even though Bobby claims he « told ’em like we said, » Ed doesn’t believe that his cowardly pal is telling the truth. Their story (that both Lewis’ broken leg and Drew’s drowning occurred at the end of the trip) contradicts the discovery of their shattered wooden canoe upstream. At the river’s edge, a skeptical Deputy Queen (Macon McCalman) and suspicious Aintry County Sheriff Ed Bullard (James Dickey) report a missing hunter in the woods (related by marriage to Deputy Queen) from a couple of days earlier, but the officials have no proof and « nothin’ to hold them for. » The Sheriff knowingly responds with an omen of their gruesome secrets:

Let’s just wait and see what comes out of the river.

As Ed and Bobby are driven back into town to the County Memorial Hospital to visit Lewis, the taxicab driver (Pete Ware) confirms their own guilt-ridden hopes:

All this land’s gonna be covered with water. Best thing ever happened to this town.

To their relief, when Lewis regains consciousness in the hospital, he confirms their story by claiming: « I don’t remember nuthin’. Nuthin' ». Before they leave Aintry, the smiling, omniscient Sheriff asks a few more biting questions and then offers home-grown advice:

Sheriff: How come you all end up with four life jackets?
Bobby: Didn’t we have an extra one?
Ed: No, Drew wasn’t wearin’ his.
Sheriff: Well, how come he wasn’t wearin’ it?
Ed: I don’t know.
Sheriff: Don’t ever do nothin’ like this again. Don’t come back up here.
Bobby: You don’t have to worry about that, Sheriff.
Sheriff: I’d kinda like to see this town die peaceful.

Ed and Bobby agree to not see each other for a while. Returning home, Ed is ‘delivered’ from the malevolent horrors of nature and reunited with his wife (Belinda Beatty) and son (Charlie Boorman, the director’s son who played a major role in The Emerald Forest (1985)).

The final frightening image is of Ed, snapping awake next to his wife from a vivid nightmare of his journey. He is fearfully haunted by a white, bony hand (of the murdered Mountain Man) rising above the surface of the water of the newly-flooded wilderness. The man’s stiff, outstretched hand – pointing nowhere – serves as a signpost. Ed lies back in his wife’s arms – unable to rest and experience ‘deliverance’ from his recurring nightmare of their experience with extreme violence.

Easy Rider (1969) is the late 1960s « road film » tale of a search for freedom (or the illusion of freedom) in a conformist and corrupt America, in the midst of paranoia, bigotry and violence. Released in the year of the Woodstock concert, and made in a year of two tragic assassinations (Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King), the Vietnam War buildup and Nixon’s election, the tone of this ‘alternative’ film is remarkably downbeat and bleak, reflecting the collapse of the idealistic 60s. Easy Rider, one of the first films of its kind, was a ritualistic experience and viewed (often repeatedly) by youthful audiences in the late 1960s as a reflection of their realistic hopes of liberation and fears of the Establishment.

The iconographic, ‘buddy’ film, actually minimal in terms of its artistic merit and plot, is both memorialized as an image of the popular and historical culture of the time and a story of a contemporary but apocalyptic journey by two self-righteous, drug-fueled, anti-hero (or outlaw) bikers eastward through the American Southwest. Their trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans takes them through limitless, untouched landscapes (icons such as Monument Valley), various towns, a hippie commune, and a graveyard (with hookers), but also through areas where local residents are increasingly narrow-minded and hateful of their long-haired freedom and use of drugs. The film’s title refers to their rootlessness and ride to make « easy » money; it is also slang for a pimp who makes his livelihood off the earnings of a prostitute. However, the film’s original title was The Loners.

[The names of the two main characters, Wyatt and Billy, suggest the two memorable Western outlaws Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid – or ‘Wild Bill’ Hickcock. Rather than traveling westward on horses as the frontiersmen did, the two modern-day cowboys travel eastward from Los Angeles – the end of the traditional frontier – on decorated Harley-Davidson choppers on an epic journey into the unknown for the ‘American dream’.]

According to slogans on promotional posters, they were on a search:

A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere…

Their costumes combine traditional patriotic symbols with emblems of loneliness, criminality and alienation – the American flag, cowboy decorations, long-hair, and drugs.

Both Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper co-starred, Fonda produced, and 32 year old Hopper directed (his first effort). [It was produced by B.B.S. (formed by Bob Rafelson – the director of Five Easy Pieces (1970), Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner), already known for the groundbreaking, surrealistic Head (1968), a cult masterpiece that starred the Monkees (from the popular TV series) and was co-written by unemployed actor Jack Nicholson.] Fonda (as lead actor), Hopper (as uncredited second unit director), and Jack Nicholson (as screenwriter) had participated in director Roger Corman’s low-budget, definitive LSD film The Trip (1967) a few years earlier. And Fonda had also starred in Roger Corman’s and American International’s ground-breaking The Wild Angels (1966) – a biker’s tale about the ‘Hell’s Angels’. The first scenes to be shot were on grainy 16 mm. in New Orleans (during Mardi Gras) on a budget of $12,000, afterwards followed by funds for a total budget of $380,000.

This follow-up film to The Wild Angels (1966) premiered at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival and won the festival’s award for the Best Film by a new director. The film received two Academy Award nominations: Best Original Screenplay (co-authored by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern – known previously for scripting Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or… (1964)), and Best Supporting Actor for Jack Nicholson in one of his earlier, widely-praised roles as a drunken young lawyer.

Easy Rider surprisingly, was an extremely successful, low-budget (under $400,000), counter-cultural, independent film for the alternative youth/cult market – one of the first of its kind that was an enormous financial success, grossing $40 million worldwide. Its story contained sex, drugs, casual violence, a sacrificial tale (with a shocking, unhappy ending), and a pulsating rock and roll soundtrack reinforcing or commenting on the film’s themes. Groups that participated musically included Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix, The Band and Bob Dylan.

The pop cultural, mini-revolutionary film was also a reflection of the « New Hollywood, » and the first blockbuster hit from a new wave of Hollywood directors (e.g., Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese) that would break with a number of Hollywood conventions. It had little background or historical development of characters, a lack of typical heroes, uneven pacing, jump cuts and flash-forward transitions between scenes, an improvisational style and mood of acting and dialogue, background rock ‘n’ roll music to complement the narrative, and the equation of motorbikes with freedom on the road rather than with delinquent behaviors.

However, its idyllic view of life and example of personal film-making was overshadowed by the self-absorbent, drug-induced, erratic behavior of the filmmakers, chronicled in Peter Biskind’s tell-all Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1999). And the influential film led to a flurry of equally self-indulgent, anti-Establishment themed films by inferior filmmakers, who overused some of the film’s technical tricks and exploited the growing teen-aged market for easy profits. Hopper’s success with this film gave him the greenlight from Universal Pictures (and $850,000) for his next project The Last Movie (1971) which ended up being a colossal failure, due in part to reports of drug-induced orgies during filming, and its year-long editing process (delayed by alleged use of psychedelic drugs for ‘inspiration’).

The Story

One morning, two free-wheeling, long-haired, social misfits/dropouts/hippies ride up to La Contenta Bar, south of the border in Mexico. With Jesus (Antonio Mendoza), they walk around the side of the bar through an auto-wrecking dump yard. After Jesus scoops out a small amount of white powder (cocaine) onto a mirror, they both sniff the dope. In Spanish, the thinner, calmer one chuckles: « Si pura vida (Yes, it’s pure life.) » Then, he hands a packet of money to Jesus who thumbs through it and smiles. The two bikers, who have presumably orchestrated the decision to buy the cocaine in Mexico, are given cases of the powder in the drug deal.

Before the film cuts to the next scene, the loud noise of a jet engine plays on the soundtrack. In the next scene of their dope deal, they are now in California where they have smuggled the drugs for sale to a dealer. The two are on an airport road next to the touch down point of jet planes at Los Angeles International Airport – the sound of approaching planes is excruciatingly loud. A Rolls Royce pulls into the frame with their Connection (Phil Spector, the famous rock and roll producer in a cameo role). While testing the white powder in the front seat of their white pickup truck, the Connection ducks every time a plane lands. In exchange for the drugs, the Bodyguard (Mac Mashourian) gives a large quantity of cash to one of the bikers in the front seat of the Rolls. The drug deal is finalized to the tune of Steppenwolf’s « The Pusher, » a song which is overtly against hard-drug pushers and dealing.

You know I smoked a lot of grass
Oh Lord, I popped a lot of pills
But I’ve never touched nothin’
That my spirit could kill
You know I’ve seen a lot of people walkin’ round
With tombstones in their eyes
But the pusher don’t care
Aw, if you live or if you die
God damn the Pusher
God damn, hey I say the Pusher
I said God damn, God damn the Pusher man.

With the stash of money they’ve made from selling drugs, they have financed their trip, including the purchase of high-handled motorcycles. One of them rolls up the banknotes and stuffs them into a long plastic tube that will be inserted snake-like into the tear-drop shaped gas tank of his stars-and-stripes decorated motorcycle. The two part-time drug dealers are:

a cool and introspective « Captain America » Wyatt (Peter Fonda) on a gleaming, silver-chromed low-riding bike with a ‘stars-and-stripes’ tear-drop gas tank, wearing a tight leather pants held at the waist by a round belt-buckle and a black leather jacket with an American flag emblazoned on the back; also with a ‘stars-and-stripes’ helmet

mustached and shaggy, long-haired Billy the Kid (Dennis Hopper), with a tan-colored bush hat, fringed buckskin jacket, shades, and an Indian necklace of animals’ teeth

Wyatt casts off his wristwatch to the ground, a literal and symbolic flourish that shows his new-found freedom and rejection of time constraints in modern society. As they take to the open road on their motorcycles, cross the Colorado River and pass through unspoiled buttes and sand-colored deserts, the credits begin to scroll, accompanied by the sound of the popular song by Steppenwolf: « Born To Be Wild. » It is the start of a beautiful adventure as they travel through memorable landscapes of America’s natural beauty, accompanied by the pounding of rock music.

Get your motor runnin’
Head out on the highway
Lookin’ for adventure
And whatever comes our way

Chorus 1
Yeah, darlin’ gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of the guns at once and
Explode into space.

I like smoke and lightnin’
Heavy metal thunder
Racin’ with the wind
And the feelin’ that I’m underRepeat of Chorus 1

Chorus 2
Like a true nature’s child
We were born, born to be wild
We can climb so high
I never wanna die.
Born to Be Wild
Born to Be Wild…

That evening, they are immediately rebuffed at a motel when they ask for a room – presumably because of their long hair, general unkempt and far-out appearance. The manager flashes the NO Vacancy sign at them. They camp out on the first leg of their cross-country odyssey to New Orleans, hoping to arrive there before the Mardi Gras celebration.

In the first of a number of campfire scenes, there is time for discussion and for short snatches of dialogue to illuminate the characters and themes of the film. In front of an open fire, Billy sings of his materialistic dreams:

I’m goin’ down to Mardi Gras
I’m gonna get me a Mardi Gras queen…

In contrast, Wyatt smokes on a joint and seems withdrawn and remote to Billy: « You’re pulling inside man. You’re getting a little distance tonight. » Wyatt explains that he is tired: « Yeah, well, I’m just getting my thing together. » The next morning, Wyatt wakens first, and explores a deserted, broken-down shed, and a drawer on the ground with a rusted compass and a withered piece of paper inside. He also looks at a frayed booklet with pages blown by the breeze.

They stop at a horse ranch to repair Wyatt’s flat tire on his bike – in symbolic, parallel juxtaposition – to a rancher who is shoeing his horse nearby. Although the loud sounding motorcycle makes the horses skittish, the rancher (Warren Finnerty), not intimidated by their odd appearance, admires Wyatt’s « good-looking machine. » Wyatt and Billy are invited to join the ranchhouse family (the rancher, his Mexican wife, and his many Mexican-American children) for an outdoor meal at the long dinner table. Wyatt respectfully compliments the rancher on his simple life of hard work, approves his self-sustaining piece of land (« nice spread »), and then clarifies his profound thoughts on his own attraction to the man’s commitment to building a comfortable life for his family – an embodiment of freedom and responsibility:

You’ve got a nice place. It’s not every man that can live off the land, you know. You do your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.

Soon restless and impatient with the domestic scene, they are on their way again through a wooded, mountainous area, while The Byrds’ « Wasn’t Born to Follow » plays on the soundtrack. Wyatt picks up a Stranger/hitchhiker (Luke Askew) and they ride up to an Enco gas station [at Sacred Mountain] to fill their tanks. Billy, who is paranoid and terrified of losing their one opportunistic chance at the good life, is nervous about having the Stranger help fill the tanks:

Billy: Hey man, everything that we ever dreamed of is in that teardrop gas tank – and you got a stranger over there pourin’ gasoline all over it. Man, all he’s got to do is turn and look over into it, man, and he can see that…
Wyatt: He won’t know what it is, man. He won’t know what it is. Don’t worry, Billy. Everything’s all right.

After filling both tanks, Wyatt holds out a bill, looking for someone to pay, but the hitchhiker dismisses him: « That’s all taken care of. » Wyatt is pleased: « I like that. » [There may be some pre-arranged payment scheme that the hitchhiker has with the owner of the gas station, but that is only speculation.] As they pull out onto the highway, the last shot cuts to the gas station building, where a poor Mexican girl looks out the window.

As they ride through more open desert terrain and the golden sun begins to set over Monument Valley, the Band’s « The Weight » is heard on the soundtrack:

I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ ’bout half-past dead
I just need some place, where I can lay my head
Hey Mister, can you tell me, where a man might find a bed
He just grinned and shook my hand, and ‘no’ was all he said
Take a load off, Fanny, take a load for free
Take a load off, Fanny, yeah, and you put the load right on me
I picked up my bag, I went lookin’ for a place to hide
Then I saw Carmen and the devil, walkin’ side by side
I said ‘Hey, Carmen, come on let’s go downtown’
She said, ‘I gotta go, but my friend can stick around’…

When night falls, they must camp again, choosing an ancient Pueblo Indian rock ruins. In the film’s second campfire scene, their figures are silhouetted against a beautiful Southwest sunset of many hues. They have a week left to get to New Orleans and the Mardi Gras. The evasive Stranger, whom they are taking to his commune, enigmatically reveals he was originally from the repression of the city:

It doesn’t make any difference what city. All cities are alike. That’s why I’m out here now…cause I’m from the city, a long way from the city – and that’s where I want to be right now.

The Stranger reprimands Billy for disrespecting the Indian graves directly underneath them: « The people this place belongs to are buried right under you. You could be a trifle polite…It’s a small thing to ask. » When Wyatt asks: « You ever want to be somebody else? », the Stranger replies: « I’d like to try Porky Pig. » Wyatt answers his own question: « I never wanted to be anybody else. »

The next day, the Stranger leads them to his New Mexico commune where hippies are gathered outside the buildings. The commune is the typical 60s embodiment of idealized dreams – another alternative style of living quite different from the world of the rancher. The bikers are immediately drawn into the commune without fear or prejudice – their dress and mode of speaking are at one with the counter-cultural commune. The Stranger is relieved to be home – he hugs and kisses one of the women and washes his face in a washbasin. Billy plays ‘cowboys and Indians’ with the hippie children, yelling: « Bang bang » as he exchanges imaginary gunfire with them. Foreshadowing future events, Billy cries out: « Pow, pow, pow. Ppttwanng. You can’t hit me, I’m invisible. I’m invisible. » But a big glob of mud hits him in the middle of his chest – an ominous foreshadowing.

Inside the barn/kitchen area of the commune building, Sarah (Sabrina Scharf) « raps » with the Stranger, concerned about more visitors and the burden they place on the hippie commune. The promise of Paradise in the commune is a lost dream:

We just can’t take anymore, Stranger. Just too many people dropping in. Oh, I’m not talking about you and your friends, you know that. And like the week before, Susan dropped in with twelve people from Easter City. She wanted to take ten pounds of rice with her…Well naturally, we had to say no…So she gets all up tight and she breaks out some hash – and she won’t give us any. Oh, and…that’s not all. The next morning, they went outside to start their bus and they couldn’t get it started…

A mime troupe in the commune has « gone down to the hot springs to bathe. » Joanne (Sandy Wyeth), one of the younger hippie girls, reads an interpretation from the I Ching and asks Lisa (Luana Anders) for help in understanding the passage:

Starting brings misfortune. Per-serverance brings danger. Not every demand for change in the existing order should be heeded. On the other hand, repeated and well-founded complaints should not fail to a hearing.

The members of the mime troupe return and interrupt the proceedings. Their self-conscious leader theatrically takes the role of the Devil:

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. We’ve come to play for our dinner. Or should I say, stay for our dinner. Or even slay for our dinner…We’ve come to drink your wine, taste your food and take pleasure in your women.

Sarah grabs the Devil and pulls him out of the kitchen – she gestures for the rest of the troupe to leave so she can prepare dinner [the women are delegated to do all the cooking!]. The barefooted Stranger walks across a dirt field and explains how the touchy-feely commune is life-affirming but barely surviving – commune members (would-be hippie farmers) are sowing seeds on unplowed, barren, sandy ground:

You see, what happened here is these people got here late in the summer. Too late to plant. But the weather was beautiful and it was easy livin’, and everything was fine. And then came that winter. There were forty or fifty of them here living in this one-room place down here. Nothing to eat – starvin’. Out by the side of the road lookin’ for dead horses…Anything they could get ahold of. Now there’s – there’s eighteen or twenty of them left and they’re city kids. Look at them. But they’re getting this crop in. They’re gonna stay here until it’s harvested. That’s the whole thing.

Wyatt asks: « You get much rain here, man? » Billy and Wyatt predict opposite outcomes for the stoned-out labors of the workers. Wyatt admires the brave determination of the inhabitants:

In one of the film’s more memorable scenes, the blessing before the meal, the camera begins a 360 degree pan around on the varied faces of a circle of people holding hands together inside the commune. The camera returns to Jack (Robert Walker, Jr.) who leads the group in an Eastern-style religious blessing for the meal, thanking God for « a place to make a stand »:

We have planted our seeds. We ask that our efforts be worthy to produce simple food for our simple taste. We ask that our efforts be rewarded. And we thank you for the food we eat from other hands – that we may share it with our fellow man and be even more generous when it is from our own. Thank you for a place to make a stand. (Amen.)

While the dance troupe, the Gorilla Theatre, entertains outdoors during the meal on a makeshift stage by singing « Does Your Hair Hang Low, » Lisa, who has taken a liking to Wyatt, sits with him against a rock. She opens by asking: « Are you an Aquarius? » Wyatt shakes his head. Then she guesses right: « Pisces. » Uneasy in the commune, Billy is not permitted to join a group including the Stranger and Sarah – one of the group holds a cross out in front of Billy and turns him away. The Stranger asks: « Who sent ya? » Billy, who is distrustful and confused by the commune’s values and unable to see any pay-off, turns back and walks over to Wyatt:

Whew. Man, look, I gotta get out of here, man. Now we – we got things we want to do, man, like – I just – uh – I gotta get out of here, man.

In exchange for the food they have eaten, Wyatt and Billy give Lisa and her friend Sarah a lift on their bikes « over across the canyon » to the hot springs. « I Wasn’t Born to Follow » by The Byrds is again heard as the group of four walk along the bank of a stream and then shed their clothes for a skinny-dip together in a rock grotto.

Back at the commune just before they leave, the Stranger solemnly offers Wyatt a small square object, a tab of acid (LSD): « When you get to the right place, with the right people, quarter this. You know, this could be the right place. The time’s running out. » Wyatt wants to stay in the idyllic setting, but Billy is impatient and restless and insists that they leave. Both drifters finally decide that they need to keep moving. Although Wyatt might stay and develop a relationship with Lisa, he realizes time is running out for them and they are compelled to continue their journey: « Yeah, I’m, I’m hip about time. But I just gotta go. »

Along the way, they soon find themselves in the middle of a parade composed of red-uniformed band members and majorettes marching down the main street of Las Vegas, New Mexico. A revolving red light on the top of a police car signals them to pull over. They are thrown in jail for crashing the parade and « paradin’ without a permit. » Billy objects vehemently as the jail cell door is closed on him:

You gotta be kidding. I mean, you know who this is, man? This is Captain America. I’m Billy. Hey, we’re headliners baby. We played every fair in this part of the country. I mean, for top dollar, too!

In an adjoining cell and lying on a cot, they meet a genial, drunken ACLU Southern lawyer, George Hanson (Jack Nicholson, in the role that made him famous). He is moaning to himself about his aching head and sleeping off a hangover: « All right now, George – what are you gonna do now? I mean, you promised these people now. You promised these people – and you promised these people and – . » George’s activist ambitions in the community have been derailed by his drinking problem. Although they’re « in the same cage here, » George, experienced with the ACLU, the rule of law, and reconciliation between opposing groups, will function as their redemption because counter-culturalists Billy and Wyatt appear scruffy and foreign-looking to the red-neck townspeople:

Well, you boys don’t look like you’re from this part of the country. You’re lucky I’m here to see that you don’t get into anything…Well, they got this here – see – uh – scissor-happy ‘Beautify America’ thing goin’ on around here. They’re tryin’ to make everybody look like Yul Brynner. They used – uh – rusty razor blades on the last two long-hairs that they brought in here and I wasn’t here to protect them. You see – uh – I’m – uh – I’m a lawyer. Done a lot of work for the A. C. L. U.

George, a synthesizing combination of liberal and conservative ideals who has been able to transcend his parochial surroundings, assures them that they can get out of jail and find freedom with his political connections – if they « haven’t killed anybody – at least nobody white. » For just $25 dollars, they are set free. After Wyatt thanks George with the words: « very groovy, » George turns toward the guards and repeats the phrase: « Very groovy. Very groovy. See there. I bet nobody ever said that to you. » A binge drinker, George appears to be a frequent visitor to the jail and knows all the guards very well. Regarded as a fellow good-ol-boy by the guards, he is able to keep his rowdy behavior a secret from his disappointed father (he is the son of a wealthy, powerful, influential figure).

Outside while looking at their « super-machines, » George toasts the day with a bottle of Jim Beam, accompanied by his elbow flapping on his side like a chicken:

Here’s to the first of the day, fellas. To ol’ D. H. Lawrence. Nik-nik-nik-f-f-f-Indians!

George is also interested in saving himself by escaping from the small town and joining them on their two to three day ride to New Orleans: « I must’ve started off to Mardi Gras six or seven times. Never got further than the state line. » He shows them a business card from his wallet that the Governor of Louisiana once gave him that eventually directs them to hedonistic, self-interested pleasures at a legendary whore house:

‘Madame Tinkertoy’s House of Blue Lights. Corner of Bourbon and Toulouse, New Orleans, Louisiana.’ Now this is supposed to be the finest whorehouse in the South. These ain’t no pork chops. These are U. S. Prime.

George presents the most unforgettable image of the film after he tells them: « Oh, oh, I’ve got a helmet. I’ve got a beauty. » He is grinning from ear to ear, wearing a gold football helmet with a blue center stripe, and riding on the back of Wyatt’s motorcycle, as « If You Want to Be A Bird » (by The Holy Modal Rounders) plays on the soundtrack. George sits up and flaps his arms.

Around the campfire that night, [the third campfire scene in the film and the first of two campfire scenes with George], George – wearing a ‘M’ letter sweater (another symbol of his traditional scholastic leanings, along with the football helmet) – takes another drink and again flaps his arms: « Nik, nik, nik, nik – Fire! » They turn George on to marijuana (« grass ») and he is soon encouraged to inhale a joint for the first time in his life after sniffing at it and expressing his doubts about lighting it up:

You- you mean marijuana. Lord have mercy, is that what that is? Well, let me see that. Mmmmm-mmm. Mmmm….I-I-I couldn’t do that. I mean, I’ve got enough problems with the – with the booze and all. I mean, uh, I – I can’t afford to get hooked…it-it-it leads to harder stuff.

Thinking it has « a real nice, uh, taste to it, » George gets high. In a hilarious conversation, his marijuana smoking prompts him to espouse his belief in aliens and UFOs:

That was a UFO, beamin’ back at ya. Me and Eric Heisman was down in Mexico two weeks ago – we seen forty of ’em flying in formation. They-they-they’ve got bases all over the world now, you know. They’ve been coming here ever since nineteen forty-six – when the scientists first started bouncin’ radar beams off of the moon. And they have been livin’ and workin’ among us in vast quantities ever since. The government knows all about ’em.

George describes more of his « crackpot idea » to Billy about how aliens from the planet Venus (from a « more highly evolved » society without war, money, or political leaders) have already landed on Earth. They don’t reveal themselves as living and working people because they are indistinguishable from normal human beings. Their mission is to help « people in all walks of life » to evolve into a higher destiny. In his theory, the US government leaders have repressed information about the extraterrestrials who represent the status quo:

Well, they are people, just like us – from within our own solar system. Except that their society is more highly evolved. I mean, they don’t have no wars, they got no monetary system, they don’t have any leaders, because, I mean, each man is a leader. I mean, each man – because of their technology, they are able to feed, clothe, house, and transport themselves equally – and with no effort…Why don’t they reveal themselves to us is because if they did it would cause a general panic. Now, I mean, we still have leaders upon whom we rely for the release of this information. These leaders have decided to repress this information because of the tremendous shock that it would cause to our antiquated systems. Now, the result of this has been that the Venutians have contacted people in all walks of life – all walks of life. (He laughs) Yes. It-it-it would be a devastatin’ blow to our antiquated systems – so now the Venutians are meeting with people in all walks of life – in an advisory capacity. For once man will have a god-like control over his own destiny. He will have a chance to transcend and to evolve with some equality for all.

They decide to save the rest of the joint for the next morning, as Wyatt advises: « It gives you a whole new way of looking at the day. »

The next morning, they continue on their trip and wind up entering a rural cafe/diner in a small Southern town, as three songs play on the soundtrack:

Don’t Bogart Me (by the Fraternity of Man)

If Six Was Nine (by the Jimi Hendrix Experience)

Let’s Turkey Trot (by Little Eva) – the selection on the jukebox in the diner

Local rednecks at one of the cafe’s booths look up at the non-conformist intruders, as the Deputy Sheriff (Arnold Hess, Jr.) rhetorically asks: « What the hell is this? Troublemakers? » His construction-site booth mate with a yellow cap, Cat Man (Hayward Robillard) adds: « You name it – I’ll throw rocks at it, Sheriff. » Teenage girls at the next booth are excited by the strangers in a different way, particularly for George: « Oh, I like the one in the red shirt with the suspenders » and for Wyatt: « Mmmm-mmm, the white shirt for me » and « look at the one with the black pants on. » In response to the attention, George and Billy make funny noises with their tongues and say: « Poontang! »

The dialogue between the Sheriff and Cat Man despises and ridicules the bikers’ long hair with crude insults:

Cat Man: Check that joker with the long hair.
Deputy: I checked him already. Looks like we might have to bring him up to the Hilton before it’s all over with.
Cat Man: Ha! I think she’s cute.
Deputy: Isn’t she, though. I guess we’d put him in the women’s cell, don’t you reckon?
Cat Man: Oh, I think we ought to put ’em in a cage and charge a little admission to see ’em.

Overhearing their ill-natured comments, George gracefully sighs at the two good ol’ boys: « Those are what is known as ‘country witticisms.’ One of the girls boldly suggests asking the bikers to take them for a ride and then is dared to « go ahead. » Other customers are also threatened and make loud asides about their appearance, insulting them as « weirdo degenerates » – the local townfolk are fearful of something they don’t understand:

Customer 1: You know, I thought at first that bunch over there, their mothers had maybe been frightened by a bunch of gorillas, but now I think they were caught.
Customer 2: I know one of them’s Alley-oop – I think. From the beads on him.
Customer 4: Well, one of them darned sure is not Oola.
Customer 1: Look like a bunch of refugees from a gorilla love-in.
Customer 2: A gorilla couldn’t love that.
Customer 1: Nor could a mother.
Customer 3: I’d love to mate him up with one of those black wenches out there.
Customer 4: Oh, now I don’t know about that.
Customer 3: Well, that’s about as low as they come. I’ll tell ya…Man, they’re green.
Customer 4: No, they’re not green, they’re white.
Customer 3: White? Huh!
Customer 4: Uh-huh.
Customer 3: Man, you’re color blind. I just gotta say that…
Customer 1: I don’t know. I thought most jails were built for humanity, and that won’t quite qualify.
Customer 2: I wonder where they got those wigs from.
Customer 1: They probably grew ’em. It looks like they’re standin’ in fertilizer. Nothin’ else would grow on ’em…
Customer 3: I saw two of them one time. They were just kissin’ away. Two males. Just think of it.

Deputy: What’cha think we ought to do with ’em?
Cat Man: I don’t damn know, but I don’t think they’ll make the parish line.

George quickly loses his hungry appetite and Wyatt rises to « split » – the waitress has refused to serve them anyway. The teenage girls follow them outside and gather around to ask for a ride, but Billy changes his mind when he notices the Deputy peering out the cafe window at them – « the Man is at the window. »

At their next campsite around a campfire (because hotels and motels won’t accept them), the film’s fourth campfire scene, George (in a conversation with Billy) expresses the prophetic theme of the film – their threat to the Establishment and to Americans who are hypocritical about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In his famous « this used to be a helluva good country » speech, George articulates the real reason for the hostility and resentment that they generate. Billy’s notion is that their non-conformist mode of dress and long hair spark intolerance. But lawyer George philosophizes that they represent something much deeper and more fearful – freedom, unconventionality, and experimentation in a materialistic, capitalistic society:

George: You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.
Billy: Huh. Man, everybody got chicken, that’s what happened, man. Hey, we can’t even get into like, uh, second-rate hotel, I mean, a second-rate motel. You dig? They think we’re gonna cut their throat or something, man. They’re scared, man.
George: Oh, they’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to ’em.
Billy: Hey man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody needs a haircut.
George: Oh no. What you represent to them is freedom.
Billy: What the hell’s wrong with freedom, man? That’s what it’s all about.
George: Oh yeah, that’s right, that’s what it’s all about, all right. But talkin’ about it and bein’ it – that’s two different things. I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. ‘Course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ’em.
Billy: Mmmm, well, that don’t make ’em runnin’ scared.
George: No, it makes ’em dangerous.

George ends his confident words of wisdom with another flap of the arm and « nik, nik, nik, nik, nik, nik, nik – Swamp. » After they settle down in their sleeping bags, unidentified men [presumably the men from the cafe] ambush and attack them and beat them with baseball bats in the dark. Billy and Wyatt are both bloodied and bruised, but George has been clubbed to death. [Ironically, George as a lawyer from a rich family shared more in common with his local assassins than either Billy or Wyatt, but he is the one who is murdered.] Billy goes through George’s wallet, wondering what to do « with his stuff. » They find some money, his driver’s license, and his card to a New Orleans brothel: « He ain’t gonna be usin’ that. » As homage to their departed friend/companion, they immediately travel on.

The next scene abruptly finds them in a New Orleans restaurant, where they are served a fancy meal with wine (as the soundtrack plays « Kyrie Eleison » by The Electric Prunes). Thinking they’ll « go there for one drink » because George « would have wanted us to, » Billy and Wyatt make their way to the House of Blue Lights, the brothel/whorehouse – a place of institutionalized love that George dreamed of visiting. The interior of the whorehouse is decorated with sexual and religious paintings and with an ornate ceiling and chandelier. The salon has a few prostitutes seated on couchs, a pimp, a Madame, and a golden-haired woman who dances on a table. After snuggling and being entertained, Billy gets smashed and enjoys spending their drug money. Remote and out of touch, Wyatt stares off into space postulating: « If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. » Wyatt looks up to an inscription on the wall which reads: « Death only closes a man’s reputation and determines it as good or bad. »

There is a momentary, quick flash forward – an aerial shot of a fire burning alongside a highway – it is the final image of the film – Wyatt’s motorcycle burns beside the road.

The Madame brings in two hookers, Mary (Toni Basil), a dark-haired woman who accompanies Wyatt, and Karen (Karen Black), the « tall one » who joins Billy. With the two prostitutes, they wander through the crowded Mardi Gras celebration in the streets, where there are large floats and revellers are singing and parading in costumes. (« When the Saints Go Marching In » plays in the background.) As the group moves down the street, Wyatt comes upon a dead dog lying at the curb – they stoop down to it.

Then, the bonded quartet enter a cemetery, a place of institutionalized death, where they all split the packet of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, given them earlier by the Stranger. Although the drug experience promises peace and enlightenment, the acid trip is a sacrament of confusion and disillusion.

A girl’s voice repeatedly recites religious creeds during the sequence:

I believe in God, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth…Was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell – the third day, he arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, to sitteth at the right hand of God – the Father Almighty. Creator of heaven and earth. I believe in God, Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ – his only son, Our Lord. Received Holy Ghost. Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried….Blessed art Thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now…

Their drug trip/experience is a disjointed, distorted, purposely chaotic sequence of images, painful memories and sounds. Wyatt overlaps the creed with his own crude ramblings and eventually ends up sobbing: « Oh Mother why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anybody tell me anything?…What are you doing to me now?…Shut up!…How could you make me hate you so?…Oh God, I hate you so much. » Both women take off their clothes and pose nude in the cemetery while Wyatt embraces one of the marble statues. They frolic throughout the crypts, but ultimately they all share a sour, bad trip together. Both Mary and Karen scream and sob: « I’m going to die. I’m dead…Do you understand?…Oh dear God, please let it be. Please help me conceive a child…I’m right out here out of my head…Please God, let me out of here. I want to get out of here…You know what I mean…You wanted me…You wanted me ugly didn’t you? I know you johns – I know you johns. »

Toward the end of their restless, nomadic odyssey, they leave New Orleans and ride on eastward to Florida, accompanied by « Flash, Bam, Pow » by The Electric Flag.

At another campfire, the fifth and final campire scene [in the last scene before the film’s climax], Wyatt and Billy exchange deep thoughts about the freedom they have found on their journey pursuing the big drug score – « the big money. » Their rootless, drifting pursuit of the American dream and the promise of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll has been questionably successful, dissatisfying, transitory and elusive. Billy is unaware of the cost of their trip to his own soul. Wyatt believes there may have been another less destructive, less diversionary, more spiritually fulfilling way to search for their freedom rather than selling hard drugs, taking to the road and being sidetracked, and wasting their lives:

On the road again the next morning to the sound of « It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) » (Bob Dylan’s tune sung by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds), they travel through more landscapes of America, scenes which reflect the regional diversity of the country and creeping industrial pollution.

The ending of the film is remarkably bleak, cynical and fatalistic. On one of the last stretches of roadside where American industry has not yet sprawled, two armed rednecks in a small pickup truck think they’ll have some fun with the two bikers:

Middle America’s hatred for the long-haired cyclists is shown in the film’s famous ending. When Wyatt speeds down the road to seek help for his dying friend, the rednecks turn around and drive toward him – gunfire again blasts through the window and Wyatt’s bike flies through the air. [Significantly, Wyatt’s dead body doesn’t appear in the final scene.] The closing image (of the earlier flash-forward) is an aerial shot floating upwards above his motorcycle which is burning in flames by the side of the road. Death seems to be the only freedom or means to escape from the system in America where alternative lifestyles and idealism are despised as too challenging or free. The romance of the American highway is turned menacing and deadly.

The words of Ballad of Easy Rider (by Roger McGuinn of The Byrds) are heard under the rolling credits. The uneasy aerial camera shot pulls back on the winding river alongside the highway. The river – which extends to the hazy horizon – is the final image of the film before a fade-out to black. The ballad is about a man who only wanted to be free like the flowing river amidst America’s natural landscape:

The river flows, it flows to the sea
Wherever that river goes, that’s where I want to be
Flow river flow, let your waters wash down
Take me from this road to some other town
All I wanted was to be free
And that’s the way it turned out to be…

The French president came into power promising a revolution, but his acceleration of market reforms has soured voters’ mood

Christophe Guilluy

The Guardian

5 Sep 2018

A little over a year after coming to power, Emmanuel Macron is turning out to be just another run-of-the-mill disappointing French president. Like his predecessors, he has seen his popularity nosedive among his political base. This “Jupiter”, who embodied newness, youth and modernity, is now bogged down in forced reshuffles and goings-on that look very much like old-fashioned political manoeuvrings. Worse, despite claiming he would lead France to become the “start-up nation”, economic performance is poor. Growth is stagnant, unemployment isn’t falling and poverty is taking a firm hold. The disappointment is all the more acute because of the expectations Macron raised among those who rejected populism in favour of a candidate who both stood for good sense and could run the economy.

This turn of events isn’t just worrying for Macron, it’s worrying for those in Europe’s pro-globalisation camp who placed their faith in him to halt the wave of populism sweeping the western world. For them, after the twin shocks of the UK’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election in the United States, Macron simply must succeed. The slide in his popularity – Macron is now more unpopular than his predecessor, François Hollande, at the same stage – is a dire warning to “globalists”. It comes at a time when Trump’s popularity among his voters is relatively stable by comparison and the American economy is growing. Macron’s fate could have far-reaching consequences for Europe’s political future.

What makes the contrast between Trump’s and Macron’s fortunes so striking is that the two presidents have so much in common. Both found electoral success by breaking free of their own side: Macron from the left and Trump from mainstream Republicanism; they both moved beyond the old left-right divide. Both realised that we were seeing the disappearance of the old western middle class.

Both grasped that, for the first time in history, the working people who make up the solid base of the lower middle classes live, for the most part, in regions that now generate the fewest jobs. It is in the small or middling towns and vast stretches of farmland that skilled workers, the low-waged, small farmers and the self-employed are concentrated. These are the regions in which the future of western democracy will be decided.

But the similarities end there. While Trump was elected by people in the heartlands of the American rustbelt states, Macron built his electoral momentum in the big globalised cities. While the French president is aware that social ties are weakening in the regions, he believes that the solution is to speed up reform to bring the country into line with the requirements of the global economy. Trump, by contrast, concluded that globalisation was the problem, and that the economic model it is based on would have to be reined in (through protectionism, limits on free trade agreements, controls on immigration, and spending on vast public infrastructure building) to create jobs in the deindustrialised parts of the US.

It could be said that to some extent both presidents are implementing the policies they were elected to pursue. Yet, while Trump’s voters seem satisfied, Macron’s appear frustrated. Why is there such a difference? This has as much to do with the kind of voters involved as the way the two presidents operate politically.

Trump speaks to voters who constitute a continuum, that of the old middle class. It is a body of voters with clearly expressed demands – most call for the creation of jobs, but they also want the preservation of their social and cultural model. Macron’s problem, on the other hand, is that his electorate consists of different elements that are hard to keep together.

The idea that Macron was elected just by the big city “winners” isn’t accurate: he also attracted the support of many older voters who are not especially receptive to the economic and societal changes the president’s revolution demands.This holds true throughout Europe. Those who support globalisation often tend to forget a vital fact: the people who vote for them aren’t just the ones on the winning side in the globalisation stakes or part of the new, cool bourgeoisie in Paris, London or New York, but are a much more heterogeneous group, many of whom are sceptical about the effects of globalisation. In France, for example, most of Macron’s support came in the first instance from the ranks of pensioners and public sector workers who had been largely shielded from the effects of globalisation.

They may dislike populism, but that doesn’t mean they have been won round to globalisation. It is among pensioners that the president’s popularity has fallen most dramatically over recent months. The Benalla scandal, when a presidential bodyguard beat up a leftwing protester, has tarnished his image. But Macron’s ratings were damaged much more by the first round of reforms he embarked on. These measures include an additional tax burden on pensioners and an overhaul of the rights of public sector workers.

So, while Trump appears to be delivering what his voters want, Macron is pushing through more and more measures that go against the wishes of his.

These developments are an illustration of the political difficulty that Europe’s globalising class now finds itself in. From Angela Merkel to Macron, the advocates of globalisation are now relying on voters who cling to a social model that held sway during the three decades of postwar economic growth. Thus their determination to accelerate the adaptation of western societies to globalisation automatically condemns them to political unpopularity. Locked away in their metropolitan citadels, they fail to see that their electoral programmes no longer meet the concerns of more than a tiny minority of the population – or worse, of their own voters.

They are on the wrong track if they think that the “deplorables” in the deindustrialised states of the US or the struggling regions of France will soon die out. Throughout the west, people in “peripheral” regions still make up the bulk of the population. Like it or not, these areas continue to represent the electoral heartlands of western democracies. By ignoring them, those who promote global economic solutions are deliberately shunning any meaningful involvement in politics. They limit themselves to supporting and managing implementation of the globalised economic model. With opinion polarising as it is now, such political passivity is suicidal. In France, voters are looking to President Macron to show that he can drive the political agenda, not just be a supporting actor to a movement that only benefits a minority. Macron promised to lead a “revolution” (the title of the book setting out his programme) but that has to be done through, and with, the forgotten regions of France – in other words through society itself.

• Christophe Guilluy is the author of Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, Periphery and the Future of France

Thursday morning I prepared a lovely prune-based compote. My husband adores this dessert, but I wondered if I shouldn’t send it over to George Will’s house, as an act of mercy. For Will has never before seemed as constipated as he did in his Thursday morning column on Donald Trump, whom he describes as “an unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate.”

What exactly does Will mean by “vulgar”? Is it an epithet that Washington arbiters of taste use to describe the regular vernacular and humor of everyday Americans? If you eschew complex ambiguity in favor of language that everyone can understand, does that make you vulgar?

In a nod to personal liberty, Will grants that Trump’s “squalid performance and its coarsening of civic life are costs of freedom that an open society must be prepared to pay.” Yes, democracy is like that. It is exuberant, and accommodates a glorious diversity of taste and expression. “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,/Stains the white radiance of Eternity,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in Adonias. I, for one, adore the stunning display of colors and shapes with which God endowed this world. There’s room here for the Trumps as well as the Wills. Eternity with its white radiance can wait.

Will describes Trump’s performance as “squalid,” and contends that he “coarsens” civic life. “Squalid,” with its connotations of filth and corruption—of something that requires sanitization—is a surprising choice of words. Surely, this is an overreaction. But then what kind of conservative would satisfy Will? Well, you’d have to go back 60 years, to a golden age when Bill Buckley made “conservatism intellectually respectable and politically palatable.” That would be the same Bill Buckley who, in a debate with Gore Vidal, exploded, “Now listen you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamned face.” Even the most righteous of conservatives, then, have a coarse streak that emerges when they’re provoked. Rage is sometimes only a normal reaction, and the absence of passion in the face of slanderous provocation can be pathological.

Interestingly, Canadians are more tolerant than Americans of this sort of behavior from their politicians. In 1996, when Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s public address was disrupted and cut short by rowdy protesters, he plowed into the crowd, grabbed one of them by the neck and forced him to the ground. He then knocked the megaphone from the hands of a second protester, and went on his way. Canadians loved him for it. The neck-hold came to be known as the “Shawinigan handshake,” named for Chretien’s hometown. Today, an illustration of Chretien applying the famous handshake to a Canadian hockey personality graces the label of a microbrew, Shawinigan Handshake Pugnacious Strong Ale.

Trump’s message resonates with working class stiffs who believe that, despite his wealth, he understands them and their concerns. When he speaks, they understand him. There’s no complex grammar to parse. And there’s none of the phony folksiness you get from the Dems, none of the sho-nuffs and y’alls from a Hillary. To many ordinary Americans, Trump represents the promise of America as a land where everyone should have an opportunity to make it to the top if he works hard enough. These are the folks who gave the last election to Barak Obama because he made this promise, and now they’re disillusioned.

But Will can’t accept that these folks might be or become Republicans. To Will, these “Trumpites” are more plausible as vulgar Archie Bunker Democrats than they are as Republicans. So let’s ignore them.

But then I recall Will sniffing his nose at another déclassé Republican candidate and his supporters as “kamikaze conservatives.“ That was Ronald Regan, and Will invited him to form a third party and lead his mob of followers “into outer darkness.” Will acknowledged that while this “would cost the party some support…it would make the party seem cleansed.”

Cleansed? Sounds like an exorcism.

The pièce de résistance of Will’s article, though, comes when he prissily asks us to perform a thought experiment: “Try to imagine Trump in an Iowa living room, with a macaroon in one hand and cup of hot chocolate balanced on a knee, observing Midwestern civilities while talking about something other than himself.” This is going to be the new litmus test for any would-be leader of the Republican Party? “Yes, I can see the value in that as well. And could I have a splash more of your delicious chocolate?”

Many Ruling Class Republicans seem to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. To these folks, the Trump-Kelly dust-up was the last straw. Writing in the Post, Jennifer Rubin bellyaches that Trump “whines,” “bellyaches,” and “complains.” Even (gasp!) “during the debate.” Trump had the unmitigated chutzpah to call out a member of the sacred media priesthood when she was behaving unprofessionally towards him. Genteel Republicans don’t do that.

As is his wont, Trump readily admits the obvious. “I’m the most fabulous whiner…. and I keep whining and whining until I win.”

And win he did, Most candidates beg the media to cover them. The reverse is true with Trump. After the dust-up with Kelly, it was Trump who black-listed Fox when he was doing the Sunday news shows, and Fox begged him to come back and make up. Wanna bet that in the future a debate moderator will think twice before treating Trump unfairly?

What Kelly had done, was to take out of context a joke that Trump had made on one of his Celebrity Apprentice shows. Adopting a confrontational tone—with blood coming out of her eyes—Kelly hurled at Trump the most asinine question that a moderator ever asked a presidential candidate. “You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?”

Trump was clearly bewildered. There’d been many shows, and he didn’t remember everything that was said on every one of them.

The context in which Trump made this statement was a conversation he’d had with contestant Brande Roderick and rock star Bret Michaels.

“Brande came in here,” Michaels said on the show, “She got down on her knees and said, ‘I passionately want to do this—’”

“Excuse me, you dropped to your knees?” Trump interrupted.

“Yes,” Roderick responded.

“That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees,” Trump said.

See anything demeaning in this banter? Brande didn’t. In fact, she was so outranged by the unfairness of Kelly’s nasty implications that she jumped to Trump’s defense: She didn’t remember the comment. Besides, this was a TV show; people were having fun being funny. And Trump had always treated her with respect. She’d witnessed the way he treats his daughter, “like a princess.” To Brande, the way a father treats his daughter reflects his attitude toward women generally. As a woman and a mother of a daughter, I can say that this is a very astute observation.

Then, another contestant, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth who, during the Clinton administration, had worked in Al Gore’s office, leapt into the fray and described Kelly’s questioning as “the lowest form of journalism,” comparing it to “going through somebody’s trash and cherry-picking.” And contestant Katrina Campins piped up that it was unfair to criticize Trump for things he’d said when he was being an entertainer. Anybody but an overly intellectualized pundit could surely see that. It was clearly a joke!

The Stump for Trump girls got that it was a joke, but they were not amused at Kelly wasting valuable debate time on inanities. These are two African American ladies whose website boasts a delightful series of short videos where the sisters analyze issues facing Americans today, including the abysmal employment situation facing African Americans under Obama’s leadership. In their opinion, there are lots of urgent issues—including unemployment—that have much more salience than the one Kelly brought up. Based on all that they’d heard Trump say in the past, they thought that he was the best man to deal with the issues that affect the lives of every-day Americans.

George Will is not the only Ruling Class Republican to express contempt for Donald Trump. And some express even more contempt for those who like him. Writing for National Review Online, Charles C. Cooke calls Trump a “virus.” (What is it with these misophobics?) and those who like him are ill, infected. You can recognize them because “by their dull, unreflective, often ovine behavior, they resemble binary and nuancless drones.” Nuancless?

Choosing Trump for the presidential nomination, explains Cooke, is “comparable…to a person’s choosing a disabled man to run in a marathon.” Who would do something like that? Oh, wait. The disabled do compete in marathons, and have done so with pride since 1972. I’m sure that Cooke didn’t intend to diss the disabled.

The problem for Ruling Class Conservatives like Will and Cooke, is that the Left has emasculated them. They tremble lest they let slip a faux pas that the Left can jump upon. They must at all times show that their Conservatism is “intellectually respectable and politically palatable,” and worry that Trump will make them look bad to the Liberals and their media. They are unable to grasp the fact that, notwithstanding all their efforts, the Left will never regard them as respectable and palatable. To achieve that goal, they must first become Liberals themselves.

Trump makes it clear that he doesn’t give a damn what Liberals think of us. And everyday people of all political persuasions applaud when he stands up to the self-important elitist media, just as they did with Newt Gingrich in 2012. It’s time for the Right to man-up. Emulate Donald Trump and the Canadians.

People voted Leave for many different reasons, but we can still identify key concerns that deserve a progressive response.

Charles Leadbeater

News Staesman

8 July 2016

The liberal left has gone through various forms of disbelief since the Brexit vote. (I include myself in this.)

First, we thought, let’s try to have another vote. Second, let’s try to subvert the outcome of the first vote through parliament. Third, let’s hope enough Leave voters wake up feeling remorseful, see the light and switch sides, especially when they realise how unattractive Britain will become. Fourth, let’s try to belittle the working-class people who voted for Brexit by suggesting: a) they are racist; b) we will all go to Stoke-on-Trent to listen to what they have to say (because being listened to by us will make them feel better); c) they fell for transparent lies because they are a bit gullible; d) we will give them some more money through state transfers, because if they had more money, they would be happier – that is what a new, fairer political settlement amounts to.

Such responses seem to underestimate the scale of the challenge. People voted Leave for many different reasons. At one end were people who are clearly racist; at the other were utopian liberal internationalists. For much of the working class, however, I think that it came down to five things. These are made for the left to respond to – if only we could work out how to bridge the gap between metropolitan, cosmopolitan progressives and working-class voters who believe in solidarity and community.

1. This was a vote for meaning, rather than money

The Remain campaign was all about money and how much people would lose if Britain exited the EU. The Leave campaign was all about restoring a semblance of meaning to people’s lives, despite not having much money. As a vote for something more than money – for pride, belonging, community, identity, a sense of “home” – it was a rejection of the market. We might not much like some elements of this “vote for meaning”, but it was a vote with the heart, rather than the wallet. The result was a reminder that people need something in their lives that feels more important than money – especially, perhaps, when they have little prospect of having much. Above all, they need a sense of narrative.

2. It was a vote for democratic decision-making over opaque and distant power

The European Union has a distant, opaque and ineffective decision-making process. Understandably, people want decisions made closer to home. Read Martin Wolf in the Financial Times or the Harvard-based economist Dani Rodrik: globalisation, democracy and the nation state are incompatible.

Nationalism may be the price that we have to pay for a sense of democratic control over our lives. This was a vote to reassert nation state democracy in a time of global markets. That may be romantic and naive but it was a vote for democracy over global forces. There is nothing wrong with people wanting control over their lives: that is what social democracy was supposed to provide. Jacqueline Rose explored this subject in her book States of Fantasy, which examines how politics is driven by a shared public fantasy. (US political life is devoted to the pursuit of the “American Dream”, not the “American Reality”. The vote on 23 June was for a kind of “British Dream” – though it may yet turn out to be a nightmare.)

3. This is high-energy politics

People have become more engaged in political debate, and it truly matters to them for the first time in years. Impassioned conversations are being had everywhere, between all sorts of people, about what kind of society we should be and what a good society is. The long-established political systems are in decline. Politics is seen as procedural, distant and untrustworthy. Yet all voters feel that they have something at stake in the outcome, something they want to defend or stand up for.

The left-wing philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger called for a “high-energy” politics to take over from the exhausted forms of representative democracy in his book What Should the Left Propose? – and this is it. Having more people politically engaged should be good for progressives, because they believe in the power of democratic politics to shape markets.

4. Objects of public love

National symbols are still the most potent objects of public love. North of the border, the Scottish National Party seems to have fashioned a forward-looking civic nationalism. If only England, led by the left, could do something similar through localism – real devolution of power to cities, towns, wards and neighbourhoods – and a new civic activism.

Most leaders of social-democratic politics are schooled in the tradition of John Rawls, which reduces the search for a fair society to a set of equations. A cheque in the post has become a substitute for human solidarity. The US legal theorist Bonnie Honig argues that as a result proceduralism – politics as a process of allocating rights and responsibilities, rather than a forum for substantive discussions about what makes for a good life or society – has replaced real engagement.

Honig’s antidote to proceduralism is a politics that is tumultuous, unpredictable, contingent and fragile, driven by passions and fantasies. She is more interested in a politics that destabilises existing procedures and leads to new forms of political power. Welcome to the Brexit world. Suck it up. Learn to adapt to it.

According to Honig, part of the answer is the creation and defence of “objects of public love”, which are the icons of our common life. These help make us a society, because we see ourselves reflected in them. In 2012, a public campaign prevented the privatisation of British forests, which became objects of public love. The 2012 London Olympics were and remain an object of public love for people in the UK, although they now feel more like a long-lost holiday romance (one involving Boris Johnson). The NHS is an object of public affection and loyalty, if not love.

Politics across Europe is now driven by a sense of loss and so such objects are more about the past than the future. If the left wants to win back the Leavers, it needs to create more civic shared objects of public love that can be draped in the Union Jack and earn our loyalty, but which also embody the values of tolerance, openness, solidarity and fairness.

A distant, top-down state of a social-democratic kind cannot create these shared objects. The left would have to embrace the decentralisation of power and expressions of the good life and relinquish statism. It is worth thinking what this would mean, for example, for the funding of arts and culture.

5. This was a vote for a version of equality

People who think that they have little to gain from globalisation voted for a new Brexit settlement in which those who already gain would find it harder to do so. The beneficiaries of a globalised, network economy will struggle now to do as well as they once did. That they will find life harder and the economy may grow less quickly matters little to people in industrial towns left stranded and with no growth in their incomes for two decades. House prices in London will fall. High earners may flee. The creative industries will suffer.

The truth is that, for a while now, growth has failed to deliver its moral dividend alongside its economic one because the increased prosperity has not been shared fairly. It should be no surprise that those who have spent years feeling overlooked and neglected by both the market and politics should now feel such resentment and so little sympathy for people with wealth, who might feel, for the first time, that the world is slipping away from them. On the contrary, it might be cause for celebration and satisfaction.

In recent times, economic growth has not delivered many dividends at the bottom of the income pile. Will slower growth after Brexit make much difference? The country may be poorer but it could become less unequal. It will almost certainly become uglier.

***

The postwar settlement was founded on Keynesian principles, a welfare state and an industrial, fully employed economy. The Thatcherite settlement was about the individual, the private and the market taking precedence over the collective, the public and the state. It was complex because it combined a belief in the strong state and the open market, and yet also a national purpose. We now stand on the verge of a Brexit settlement that will redress the relationships between Britain and Europe, between the white working class and immigrants, and between the cosmopolitan and urban and the communal and provincial.

Seen from this perspective, there should be a lot for the left to work with in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. People want more meaning in their lives. They want more democracy. They want an engaged, high-energy politics. They will rally around objects of public love if they are attractive and meaningful. They want greater equality and more of a sense of community. They want lives that have a narrative, and they want national pride to be a part of that. They want a sense that they can exert some control over what is going on around them.

This is everything that the left should stand for. We just need to show how all of this is made more possible in a UK that is a part of Europe and, like countries such as Norway and Canada, unafraid of the free flows of people, trade and ideas that also make us rich, diverse and exciting.

Charles Leadbeater is an associate of the Centre for London and the co-author of “Hollow Promise: How London Fails People on Modest Incomes and What Should Be Done About It”

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12 Responses to Mépris de classe: Qui veut être traité de déplorable ou de Dupont Lajoie ? (Jaws for sharks: 40 years of hollywoodization and they put you in the basket of racist deplorables and bitter clingers)

WHAT RESISTANCE ? (Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind: With two impeached or jailed presidents and countless indicted ministers, officials or governors as well as soaring unemployment and staggering violence, guess what a Left-wing opposition which dug up its very own hole is now calling for ? )

Bolsonaro surfed a tsunami of popular anger and despair that swept away the entire Brazilian political system, along with the old party leaders. He was able to do so because of the people’s growing suspicion that representative democracy is incapable of delivering what they need. This disaffection was compounded by a brutal economic recession in Brazil, the longest in our history. Unemployment soared, urban violence reached staggering heights — nearly 64,000 homicides in 2017 or 175 deaths per day. Organized crime spiraled out of control. Political parties, especially the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), floundered in corruption. It was no wonder that the political system collapsed. Of the four presidents elected after the 1988 Constitution took effect, two were impeached, one is in jail for corruption and the other is me. So far, the sweeping anti-corruption investigation, known as Operation Car Wash, has resulted in the indictments of a former PT treasurer, a former presidential chief of staff, the president of the lower house of congress, a government minister and several state governors. They have been charged with corruption or bribery or both, with several sentenced to years in jail.

Beyond this long list of wrongdoings lies profound structural faults. The fourth industrial revolution modified the forms of production and the way people relate to each other. Today, people are connected not just by their political organizations. The Internet enhances connectivity and amplifies voices, subjecting voters to waves of opinion often driven by resentment and fear and sometimes hate.

Meanwhile, mainstream media is losing its influence. Society has lost its former cohesion. Political parties and trade unions, which once gave meaning to political projects and ideologies, no longer draw support and solidarity. As a result, people’s political choices are often guided by messages generated by their social networks. And when the corruption of political parties, statesmen and leaders is exposed, anger against politicians overshadows all other concerns. That is exactly what happened here in Brazil.

It is imperative to reweave the threads that link political institutions with the dynamics of the economy and society. This will not happen by adhering to the regressive wave that divides society into enemy camps, but rather by exposing its inconsistencies with the national interest.

In contemporary, networked societies, people are no longer an amalgam of individuals compacted into “masses.” They seek information to make individual choices. The common ground has not withered away, but it needs to be reframed, so that is felt as something good for all people. Whenever there is an epochal shift like this, what once was solid seems to vanish into thin air. But it does not disappear. The challenge is to make values and interests coalesce in a contemporary way.

During this electoral campaign, fear, insecurity and the visceral rejection of corruption touched people’s hearts. The crossfire of accusations demoralized traditional parties and candidates. The media did its best to characterize all politicians as birds of a feather. Social issues like the brutal rise in income inequality and unemployment levels, as well as the lack of public investment due to fiscal imbalances, added to a dysfunctional party system, paving the way to our “new” politics. The end result was no less than the emergence of a populist leader with no clear definition of public policies, no real congressional base of support and no long-term political organization.

This political crisis does not end with yesterday’s election. Without rebuilding trust, how can the economy recover, employment rebound and social policies expand? This must be the agenda for the immediate future. Hopefully, the pathways to economic prosperity and social equality will be found. But the elected government does not look promising.

Democracy was the overriding cause for my generation. It is always a work in progress. Today, it may be at risk in Brazil, as it is elsewhere. If human rights and the rule of law are threatened, our obligation will be to stand up and resist.